Space & Astronomy

The magnetic field swirling around an enormous black hole, located about 55 million light-years from Earth, has unexpectedly switched directions. This dramatic reversal challenges theories of black hole physics and provides scientists with new clues about the dynamic nature of these shadowy giants.

The supermassive black hole, nestled in the heart of the M87 galaxy, was first imaged in 2017. Those images revealed, for the first time, a glowing ring of plasma­ — an accretion disk — encircling the black hole, dubbed M87*. At the time, the disk’s properties, including those of the magnetic field embedded in the plasma, matched theoretical predictions. More

Astronomy is the oldest science, and the sky is among our first laboratories. Long before the written word, people erected stone circles to frame the first dawn rays of the summer solstice, etched lunar calendars in bone and wove the planets into their myths. Eventually, we learned to measure the heavens, and in the 16th century the Copernican revolution rewrote our world’s place within them. But for all the long millennia that men of science had peered up at the heavens, it was a woman who would be the first to truly know the stars.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was just 25 years old when she discovered what stars are made of: hydrogen, helium and just a dash of nearly every other element. Her finding in 1925 was among the first successful attempts to apply the nascent field of quantum physics to observations of stars, and it was immediately controversial. At the time, astronomers believed that stars were essentially just hot Earths — incandescent orbs of iron, silicon and the other heavy elements that constitute our rocky world. Payne-Gaposchkin, a young woman astronomer, was asking her senior colleagues to throw out everything they thought they’d known about stars and write the universe anew. More