Despite decades of searching for this signal, astronomers have yet to find it. The problem is that our Earth is too noisy, making it nearly impossible to capture this whisper. The solution is to go to ...

Black holes are fundamental to the structure of galaxies and critical in our understanding of gravity, space, and time. A ...

Astronomers tallying up all the normal matter—stars, galaxies and gas—in the universe today have come up embarrassingly short of the total matter produced in the Big Bang 13.6 billion years ago.

Sometimes black holes generate beams of ionized gas (plasma) that shoot outward at nearly light speed. Although discovered more than a century ago, how and why jets occur has remained a mystery ...

Inspired by Iron Man’s Arc Reactor, we created a real-life ionized plasma generator—and it’s as close to sci-fi as you can get. This isn’t just a glowing prop; it’s a functioning tech ...

Seeing Lyman-α photons emanating from a galaxy means the galaxy must have blown a bubble of ionized gas around it big enough to let the particles of light reach our telescopes today.

It also studies plasmas, which are ionized gases that enshroud nuclear fusion reactions. Researchers around the world are pursuing fusion as a clean and virtually limitless form of energy ...