Squeeze enough stuff into one spot, space-time itself will pucker up in a sweet cosmic kiss known as a black hole.

As far as Einstein’s sums are concerned, that ‘stuff’ includes the massless glow of electromagnetic radiation. Given E = mc², which describes the equivalence between mass and energy, the energy of light itself should – in theory – be capable of creating a black hole if enough of it is concentrated in one spot.

Before you crack out the big-gun lasers and punch some holes into the Universe’s floorboards, there’s one thing researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and the University of Waterloo in Canada want you to know.

In late 2019, the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 unexpectedly brightened, prompting astronomers to investigate the cause using data from various observatories, including the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT).

The study, recently published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, suggests an unprecedented event: the sudden awakening of the massive black hole at the galaxy’s core.

“Imagine you’ve been observing a distant galaxy for years, and it always seemed calm and inactive,” said Paula Sánchez Sáez, an astronomer at ESO.

Are scientists wrong about dark energy? It looks like that could be the case.

Let’s dive into some recent findings from DESI, or the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, to talk about its weird findings and how that might change our understanding of the universe.

Dark energy is not related to dark matter, even though they have similar names. They’re both called “dark,” though, because they’re not directly observable. We infer their existence based on how we’ve observed our universe behaves.

George Mason is the home for the new $19.5 million NASA Landolt Space Mission. Led by the College of Science’s Peter Plavchan, with the College of Engineering and Computing, this mission will launch an artificial star in orbit to help scientists calibrate telescopes and measure brightness.

Two superluminous quasars, or active black holes at the centers of large galaxies, were found just 900 million years after the Big Bang — the earliest detection of a pair of merging quasars ever seen.

Scientists think they know what’s causing this unprecedented brightening.

New data revises our view of this unusual supernova explosion. A team of scientists used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to parse the composition of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. With the telescope’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), the team gathered data that is […].