What We're Reading

The hypermassive star was produced by the merger of two smaller neutron stars. Normally such collisions result in neutron stars so massive that they collapse into a black hole almost instantaneously under their own gravity. But the latest observations revealed the monster star hovering in view for more than a day before it faded out of sight.

For 200 years researchers have theorized that protons hop from one water molecule to another by attaching to the nearest molecule and kicking off one of the protons already bonded there. Now a team of scientists in Beijing has imaged such particles under a microscope for the first time, helping illuminate how these jumps occur.

Thermodynamic phases governed by the strong nuclear force have been linked together using multiple theoretical tools.

Telescopes around the world are capturing photons from the blast, and researchers anticipate exciting discoveries ahead.

Telescopes around the world are capturing photons from the blast, and researchers anticipate exciting discoveries ahead.

New experiments seem to show that quarks respond more than expected to an electric field pulling on them. The result suggests that the strong force isn’t quite as strong as theory predicts.

Researchers from six U.K. universities will crunch data and build new instrumentation for the Simons Observatory, a group of telescopes that scan the heavens from a vantage point on Cerro Toco, 5,300 meters above the Atacama desert in Chile.

About 800,000 cells linked to a computer gradually learned to sense the position of the game's electronic ball and control a virtual paddle, a team Cortical Labs in Melbourne, Australia reported recently in the journal Neuron.

CCA's Adrian Price-Whelan is among the early-career researchers recognized by Astronomy magazine for making an impact in their field.

Gravity rules outer space, whereas quantum mechanics rules inner space, the arena of atoms and elementary particles. The two realms long seemed to have nothing to do with each other, but a blizzard of research in the last decade on the inner lives of black holes has revealed unexpected connections between the two views of the cosmos.