The universe has delivered the loudest gravitational wave ever recorded, and it appears to have given Einstein’s theory of general relativity one of its toughest tests so far. According to the study ...

Let's turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don't have to do any work—we just have to be in the right spot. But how can the sun be a telescope? The sun is not a mirror, but it is a lens. And we ...

Astronomers and astrophysicists at five different pulsar timing array collaborations today announced data that strongly suggests the presence of a gravitational wave background: a constant murmur of ...

LIGO confirmed the existence of gravitational waves in 2015, detecting one-time perturbations of spacetime from the merger of large black holes. There should be a background of gravitational waves ...

Orbital observatories such as the Hubble Space Telescope and James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can see far back into the universe—so far, in fact, that they have revealed some of the earliest galaxies ...

On Thursday, the European Space Agency’s Science Programme Committee gave the go-ahead to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA project. This would mean the construction of the mission’s ...

Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime predicted by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, first detected in 2015. But an expected corresponding low-frequency ...

To understand why scientists are excited about detecting a new background, just look to the history of studies of the CMB. There’s a new cosmological background in town. In June, researchers from the ...

Think of spacetime as a rubber sheet, which is stretched when there are large objects such as stars and black holes. Gravitational waves are the waves on this cloth, which are produced when the masses ...

Decades ago physicists realized that gravitational waves are no mere passing phenomenon. Instead those ripples in space should leave behind permanent marks: a fixed distortion in their wake. So far ...

Ten years ago today, on Sept. 14, physicists detected gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos for the first time. The roots of this discovery date back a century. Albert Einstein's general ...