Space

Small black holes making a meal out of companion stars are surprisingly messy eaters, astronomers using a Japanese space telescope have discovered. Scientists have known for some time that when supermassive black holes — those with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun — devour matter, such as surrounding gas and dust or even an unfortunate passing star, most of that material…

It’s a scene that could evoke popular fantasy stories, with sparkling stars shining above misty mountaintops, but the James Webb Space Telescope image you see above is of a very real part of our universe. It shows peaks jutting up from a vast nebula that sits about 5,500 light-years away from our planet. The nebula is NGC 6357, which is also known as the Lobster Nebula in the constellation…

Using gravitational waves, tiny ripples in space-time first predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1915, astronomers have discovered that a “stellar graveyard” is packed with mergers between extreme stellar remnants like black holes and neutron stars, created when massive stars die in supernova explosions. Evidence of these mergers also came in the form of the most massive binary black…