Ashish Mahabal

A massive star's explosion is bright but brief. The flash itself lasts weeks, but the dust it heats around it glows in infrared for years. It's like a camera flash illuminating a room, then hot dust particles lingering in the air — only on a cosmic scale.

When black holes or neutron stars merge, they disturb the very fabric of spacetime, producing gravitational waves — ripples predicted by Einstein in his general theory of relativity.