As a kid, Janna Levin loved cosmology—now, she’s an award-winning author and host of “Black Hole Apocalypse.” ...

A quasar that is the first in the early universe to be found by its flicker, more luminous than 2 trillion suns, could reveal ...

New research suggests that relic black holes from before the big bang may still shape galaxies today. These black holes could explain dark matter, one of the biggest unsolved questions in cosmology.

Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don't know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form ...

Dark matter doesn't interact with anything but gravity. So what happens to it in the vicinity of black holes, where gravity ...

There are black holes that are too big to be born from the death of a star but aren’t quite supermassive either. There’s finally evidence for where those came from.

An unusually massive black hole in the very early universe may be a kind of exotic, star-less black hole first theorised by Stephen Hawking. In August, Boyuan Liu at the University of Cambridge and ...

Some things in cosmology may simply be unknowable. Why is there something rather than nothing? What lies outside the universe? What is inside a black hole? That last one has been niggling at ...

To study the origins of our universe is to struggle with profound chicken-or-egg questions. We know the Big Bang happened. Cosmologists can see its afterglow in the sky. But no one knows whether the ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. An award-winning reporter writing about stargazing and the night sky. Astronomers have detected what may be the most massive black ...

Astronomers have spotted a rare, rule-breaking quasar in the early Universe that appears to be growing its central black hole at an astonishing pace. Observations show the black hole is devouring ...

Black holes get a bad rap. They’ve been cast as the monsters of the cosmos — gobbling up stars and stretching anything that gets too close into cosmic spaghetti. But Black Hole expert Janna Levin has ...