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“Astounding” — Astronomers Reveal Hidden Monster Black Hole Lurking in Our Galactic Backyard

Astronomers have found compelling evidence for the closest known supermassive black hole outside the Milky Way. This enormous black hole resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of our galaxy’s nearest neighbors.

The discovery was made by precisely tracking the motion of 21 stars located on the outskirts of the Milky Way. These stars are moving so rapidly that they will eventually escape the gravitational pull of the Milky Way and any nearby galaxies. Such stars are known as “hypervelocity” stars.

By analyzing their trajectories, much like forensic scientists tracing a bullet’s path, researchers were able to determine their origins. About half of the stars were found to have been ejected by the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The rest, however, appear to have been flung out by a different source: a previously undetected supermassive black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Stars That Froze Mid-Song: How Starquakes Reveal a Hidden Stage in Galactic Evolution

Some stars in our galaxy pulse like musical instruments, and scientists have found a way to listen in. These rhythmic starquakes, like vibrations in a string or drum, reveal vital clues about a star’s age, composition, and life cycle.

By studying these “melodies” in a star cluster called M67—whose stars are like solar siblings—researchers uncovered a strange pause in stellar evolution called the “plateau.” This discovery helps pinpoint stellar ages with remarkable precision, bringing us closer to understanding how stars, and ultimately our galaxy, have evolved.

Celestial Music: Listening to Starquakes.

Legendary U.S. Particle Collider Is About to Perform Its Final Smash

After 25 years of smashing gold nuclei together at light speeds, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is hanging up its boots—erm, superconducting magnets.

The collider’s final run—its 25th—kicked off this week on Long Island, in a swan song for the venerable collider that will be succeeded—in fact, transformed into—Brookhaven Lab’s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Over the course of 2025, RHIC physicists will complete data collection on quark-gluon plasma, the soup of particles that existed in the earliest days of the universe.

“The original idea behind RHIC was to create, for the first time on Earth, a state of matter that existed in the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang: the quark-gluon plasma, and we did,” said James Dunlop, the associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven Lab, in a call with Gizmodo. “That’s one of the big legacies—that we actually created it—but the more interesting thing is that its properties were quite different from what we’d expected them to be.”

What Is Hyperspace? Exploring the Science Behind FTL

Is there a hidden dimension beyond space and time, a cosmic shortcut that could let us defy the speed of light? From warp drives to wormholes, science fiction has long dreamed of hyperspace travel—but could it ever be real?

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Credits:
What Is Hyperspace? Exploring the Science Behind FTL
Episode 492; March 27, 2025
Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur.
Edited by: Merv Johnson II
Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images.
Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator.
Phase Shift, \

Bridging the gap between the cosmic microwave background and the first galaxies

One of the Holy Grails in cosmology is a look back at the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Unfortunately, the universe’s first few hundred thousand years are shrouded in an impenetrable fog. So far, nobody’s been able to see past it to the Big Bang. As it turns out, astronomers are chipping away at that cosmic fog by using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile.

ACT measured light first emitted in the baby some 380,000 years after the Big Bang. According to the Consortium director Suzanne Staggs, that measurement opened the window to a time when the first cosmic structures were starting to assemble. “We are seeing the first steps towards making the earliest stars and galaxies,” she said. “And we’re not just seeing light and dark, we’re seeing the in high resolution. That is a defining factor distinguishing ACT from Planck and other, earlier telescopes.”

The clearer data and images from ACT are also helping scientists understand just when and where the first galaxies began to form. If the ACT data are confirmed, they represent the earliest baby picture of the universe, showing scientists what the seeds of galaxies looked like only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers unveil ‘baby pictures’ of the first stars and galaxies

The clearest and most precise images yet of the universe in its infancy—the earliest cosmic time accessible to humans—have been produced by an international team of astronomers.

Measuring light, known as the (CMB), that traveled for more than 13 billion years to reach a telescope high in the Chilean Andes, the new images reveal the universe when it was about 380,000 years old—the equivalent of hours-old baby pictures of a now middle-aged cosmos.

The research, by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, shows both the intensity and polarization of the earliest light after the Big Bang with unprecedented clarity, revealing the formation of ancient, consolidating clouds of hydrogen and helium that later developed into the first stars and galaxies.

Webb telescope sees galaxy in mysteriously clearing fog of early universe

Astronomers have identified a bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in the very early universe. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.

A key goal of the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has been to see further than ever before into the distant past of our universe, when the first galaxies were forming after the Big Bang, a period known as cosmic dawn.

Researchers studying one of those very early galaxies have now made a discovery in the spectrum of its light, that challenges our established understanding of the universe’s early history. Their results are reported in the journal Nature.