Gravitational Waves

Colliding Neutron Stars are the Ultimate Particle Accelerators

Gamma-ray telescopes observing neutron star collisions might be the key to identifying the composition of dark matter. One leading theory…

6 days ago

Gravitational Waves Could Show us the First Minute of the Universe

Astronomers routinely explore the universe using different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum from the familiar visible light to radio waves…

2 months ago

Simulation Perfectly Matches What We See When Neutron Stars Collide

There are many mysteries in the world of astronomy and a fair number relate to the processes during the end…

3 months ago

Vampire Stars Get Help from a Third Star to Feed

Some stars are stuck in bad binary relationships. A massive primary star feeds on its smaller companion, sucking gas from…

4 months ago

Vera Rubin Will Find Binary Supermassive Black Holes. Here’s How.

When galaxies merge, we expect them to produce binary black holes (BBHs.) BBHs orbit one another closely, and when they…

4 months ago

New Telescopes to Study the Aftermath of the Big Bang

The NSF just awarded researchers at UChicago to start developing the CMB-S4 experiment, which will map the earliest moments of…

5 months ago

A Black Hole Switched On in the Blink of an Eye

A new study describes how astronomers discovered a supermassive black hole that suddenly "switched on" and became

8 months ago

Gravitational Waves Can Be Gravitationally Lensed, and This Could Provide Another Way to Measure the Expansion of the Universe

Astronomers can never have enough ways to measure the expansion in the Universe, from nearby stars to distant quasars. A…

9 months ago

Next Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors Could Pin Down Dark Matter

Gravitational astronomy is a relatively new discipline that has opened many doors for astronomers to understand how the huge and…

9 months ago

Early Black Holes Were Bigger Than We Thought

Every large galaxy in the nearby universe contains a supermassive black hole at its core. The mass of those black…

9 months ago