Falling into a black hole may sound like something from a science fiction movie, but it is a very real phenomenon studied by physicists for decades. Black holes are formed when massive stars collapse ...

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Some things in cosmology may simply be unknowable. Why is there something rather than nothing? What lies outside the universe? What is inside a black hole? That last one has been niggling at ...

You hurtle through space, barreling toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy. A cosmic traveler, you shed the confines of human speed. As you reach our galaxy’s heart, you see it. Sagittarius A, our ...

A black hole that was eaten by a star seems to have gotten revenge by consuming the star from the inside, producing a gamma-ray burst spotted about 9 billion light-years from Earth. The burst, called ...

A massive star 2.5 million light-years away simply vanished — and astronomers now know why. Instead of exploding in a supernova, it quietly collapsed into a black hole, shedding its outer layers in a ...

It’s the greatest cosmic murder mystery of the year: How did a black hole destroy a star—and what kind of black hole is the culprit? Normally, so-called “gamma ray bursts,” sudden flashes of extremely ...