Natalie Wolchover

At stake are fundamental ideas about how black holes form—and a six-way bet.

Although Einstein’s theory of space-time seems more complicated than Newtonian physics, it greatly simplified the mathematical description of the universe.

Opinions differ about what recent measurements of a sound-trapping fluid reveal about light-trapping black holes.

No new particles have been found at the Large Hadron Collider since the Higgs boson in 2012, but physicists say there’s much we can still learn from the Higgs itself.

A roundup of some of the most important discoveries gleaned so far from the Gaia space observatory’s new map of the galaxy.

The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match.

New data tracking the movements of millions of Milky Way stars have effectively ruled out the presence of a “dark disk” that could have offered important clues to the mystery of dark matter.

The American physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish were honored for dreaming up and realizing the experiment that confirmed the existence of gravitational waves.

A California housewife who in the 1970s discovered four new types of tessellating pentagons is dead at 94.

Breathless media coverage notwithstanding, the cases for and against a hypothetical Planet Nine in the outskirts of the solar system remain inconclusive.

The Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory’s third detection further compounds the mystery of why black holes collide.

Physicists are attempting to map the distribution of the prime numbers to the energy levels of a particular quantum system.