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Explanation: A mere 2.5 million light-years away, the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, really is just next door as large galaxies go. In this (inset) scan, image data from NASA's Nuclear Spectrosopic Telescope Array has yielded the best high-energy X-ray view yet of our large neighboring spiral, revealing some 40 extreme sources of X-rays, X-ray binary star systems that contain a black hole or neutron star orbiting a more normal stellar companion. In fact, larger Andromeda and our own Milky Way are the most massive members of the local galaxy group. Andromeda is close enough that NuSTAR can examine...

Enlarge ImageBoom! After being hit with laser beams, a small plastic pellet (sunlike object) emits x-rays, some of which bombard a pellet of silicon (blue and purple). Credit: Adapted from S. Fujioka et al., Nature Physics, Advance Online Publication A team of researchers has created conditions analogous to those found outside of a black hole by blasting a plastic pellet with high-energy laser beams. The advance should sharpen insights into the behavior of matter and energy in extreme conditions. Astronomers can't observe black holes directly because their immense gravity won't let light escape. Instead, they have focused on what...

Observations of giant clouds of galaxies far out in space and time have revealed new evidence that some mysterious force began to push the cosmos apart six billion years ago, astronomers said yesterday. The results constitute striking confirmation of one of the weirdest discoveries of modern science: that the expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, the galaxies flying apart faster and faster with time, under the influence of some antigravitational force. The work, astronomers said, opens up a powerful new way of investigating the nature of this "dark energy" and its effect on the destiny of the cosmos....

New X-ray observations by orbiting satellites have given astronomers their first telling evidence that appears to confirm what had been only theory: that a star is doomed if it ventures too close to a supermassive black hole. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the European Space Agency announced yesterday the detection of a brilliant flare of X-rays from the heart of a distant galaxy, followed by a fading afterglow. After analysis, an international team of scientists concluded that the telescopes had witnessed the overpowering gravity of a black hole as it tore apart a star and gobbled up a...

<p>STOCKHOLM, Sweden — A Japanese and two American astrophysicists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for using some of the most obscure particles and waves in nature to increase understanding of the universe.</p> <p>Riccardo Giacconi, 71, of the Associated Universities Inc. in Washington, D.C., will get half of the $1 million prize for his role in ``pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources.''</p>