Einstein’s claim that the speed of light is constant has survived more than a century of scrutiny—but scientists are still daring to test it. Some theories of quantum gravity suggest light might ...

Scientists at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL have realized a long-pursued experimental goal in physics: to show how ...

There are monstrous objects at the heart of every large galaxy — black holes that are millions or even billions of times more massive than the sun. And when these “supermassive” black holes start to ...

Using the Super Proton Synchrotron, the team created beams of electron-positron pairs and passed them through a meter-long region of plasma. This setup served as a scaled laboratory version of a ...

A tiny, dense stellar corpse in a nearby galaxy is pumping out so much energy that, on paper, it should have blown itself ...

Scientists have created a new class of laser beam that appears to violate long-held laws of light physics. These new beams, which the team calls “spacetime wave packets,” follow different rules of ...

Lightning has captivated scientists for centuries, but despite extensive research, the precise atmospheric conditions that trigger a lightning strike within thunderclouds have remained a profound ...

X‐ray binaries serve as natural laboratories for investigating the extreme physics of accretion and relativistic phenomena. These systems, comprising a compact object – typically a black hole or ...