Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

An Einstein ring (also known as an Einstein-Chwolson ring or Chwolson ring) is created as the light from distant objects, like galaxies, pass by an extremely large mass, like a galaxy cluster or a massive galaxy.

The Euclid space telescope's findings support a cosmic phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein.

Betelgeuse's unbelievable speed left experts in awe. They're beginning to think it's all just smoke and mirrors.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna could discover gigantic ripples in spacetime from merging supermassive black holes and more

Thesan is a new universe simulation that models the first billion years of the universe with the highest resolution, over the largest volume, to date.

When this nearby binary system explodes, it will be 10 times brighter than the moon.

If our 13.8 billion-year-old cosmos could be considered middle-aged, researchers note these new images captured around its 380,000th birthday represent a snapshot of the universe as a newborn.

Einstein predicted the existence of gravitationally-warped rings of light in 1915. Now, a new one has been discovered just a cosmic stone's throw from our own planet.

In a hypothetical scenario, small, primordial black holes could be captured by newly forming stars. An international team, led by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, has now modeled the evolution of these so-called "Hawking stars" and found that they can have surprisingly long lifetimes, resembling normal stars in many aspects. The work is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The oldest ever black holes, a preview of our solar system's gory demise, and a measurement of distant starlight that threatens to bring the standard of cosmology crashing down — here are the JWST's wildest discoveries of 2023.

MIT postdoc Leila Mirzagholi is working to understand the effects of environmental changes on global vegetation. Her latest paper shows how global warming effects the timing of autumn leaf senescence.

York University and an international team of astrophysicists have made an ambitious attempt to simulate the formation of galaxies and cosmic large-scale structure throughout staggeringly large swaths of space.

The light they produce wobbles around, making them hard to pin down.

Named after a goddess of the dawn, the Thesan simulation of the first billion years helps explain how radiation shaped the early universe. It all started around 13.8 billion years ago with a big, cosmological "bang" that brought the universe suddenly and spectacularly into existence. Shortly afte

A pair of white dwarfs, located just 150 light-years from Earth, appears doomed to die in a type 1a supernova that will shine brighter than anything currently visible in the night sky. But humanity — and our planet — will be long gone before this happens.

Europe's Euclid space telescope has detected a rare halo of bright light around a nearby galaxy

The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope was going through preliminary tests in September 2023 when it captured images of an Einstein Ring in a nearby galaxy.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Rodents eating herbal remedies. I watched a truck mistaken for an alien message. All those moments will be lost in time, like the Upper West Side under land subsidence.

Astronomers at the University of Toronto have discovered a population of massive stars that have been stripped of their hydrogen envelopes by their companions in binary systems. The findings, published in Science, shed light on the hot helium stars that are believed to be the origins of hydrogen-poor core-collapse supernovae and neutron star mergers.

In a study published today in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, researchers at the University of Toronto reveal a theoretical breakthrough that may explain both the nature of invisible dark matter and the large-scale structure of the universe known as the cosmic web. The result establishes a new link between these two longstanding problems in astronomy, opening new possibilities for understanding…