Astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around single stars, but few around binary stars—even though both types of stars are equally common. Physicists can now explain the dearth.

General relativity helps explain the lack of planets around tight binary stars by driving orbital resonances that eject or destroy close-in worlds. This process naturally creates a “desert” of ...

Astronomers have long faced a strange contradiction: most stars are born in pairs, and ...

A newly detected gravitational wave, GW250114, is giving scientists their clearest look yet at a black hole collision—and a powerful way to test Einstein’s theory of gravity. Its clarity allowed ...

One such mystery, described in a recent paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, concerns circumbinary exoplanets—or rather, the shortage thereof—in the now 6,000+ exoplanets confirmed to date.

At the center of the Milky Way, close to the pull of a supermassive black hole, astronomers have found a strange new radio signal that behaves like a slow, steady clock. This object is more than an ...

The sharpest black hole collision ever detected just gave Einstein another win—and raised hopes that the next one might ...

Albert Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, but not for relativity—the theory that made him famous. This article unpacks why the Nobel committee hesitated: Alfred Nobel’s rules, distrust of ...

The discovery of the double pulsar stunned scientists 🌌 Professor Brian Cox explains how this rare cosmic system confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity, revealing precise evidence of space ...

The second reason is simple: location, location, location! The millisecond pulsar appears to be near Sagittarius A*, the ...

The earliest black holes in the universe may not have disappeared from Hawking radiation after all, new research hints.