Expert Voices Paul Sutter: Explaining astrophysics and astronomy

The modern scientific fields of astronomy and physics stretch back for centuries, and so naturally they've accumulated a lot of interesting names for objects, ideas, and phenomena.

A large population of small black holes could have flooded the young cosmos with particles and radiation, creating their own black hole-powered Big Bang, physicists propose in a new paper.

These cosmic rays typically come from the extremely distant universe, from ultrapowerful events such as supernovas and quasars.

Mercury is so strange that astronomers have not been able to explain its properties with simulations of the solar system's formation. But now, researchers have found an important clue.

Finding and studying these strange stars helps us understand the complicated life cycles of normal, more well-behaved stars.

Want to become a published astronomer? All it takes is a spare telescope, or at least a decent internet connection, and plenty of patience.

Einstein toyed with the idea of faster-than-light-particles but found that such particles violated a central rule of the universe: causality.