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Nobody knows how the universe’s biggest black holes grow so large. Now one astrophysicist says it’s because they feed on the quantum foam that makes up the fabric of spacetime One of the more fascinating astrophysical discoveries in recent years is that almost all galaxies hide supermassive black holes at their cores. Indeed, astronomers believe that galaxies and black holes have a kind of symbiotic relationship so that one cannot form or grow without the other. The evidence comes from observations of galaxies both near and far—almost all contain huge black holes. But that raises an interesting question. We see...

The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right? Well, maybe not. Try and figure this out. Astronomers studying radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would overturn Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons should move at the speed of light. Uh oh Einstein. The discovery was made using the new MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov) telescope, located on a mountain top on the Canary...