R. Yamazaki

In a courtroom, there isn't always a video recording of the crime. Sometimes the verdict is based on witness testimony: what happened before, what happened after. That's exactly how physicists treated the signal GW250114, detected on January 14, 2025.

At the heart of many galaxies lies an invisible beacon — a supermassive black hole. As it devours matter, it blasts a dazzling beam of gamma rays into space. If that beam points towards Earth, astronomers see a blazar — a bright but fickle point.

A proton can't be seen as a simple ball. If you hit it with a photon, it can absorb energy and jump into an excited state, like a bell that starts ringing at a certain frequency after being struck. These states are called nucleon resonances, and they live very briefly before decaying into other particles.

After a supernova explosion, a neutron star neutron star remains: a city-sized ball of unimaginably dense matter, spinning hundreds of times per second. Any tiny bump on its surface would make it wobble like an off-balance spinning top, humming faintly through the fabric of space.

LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA detectors act like giant microphones, listening in on gravitational waves — vibrations of space itself. The new GWTC-5.0 catalog recorded 161 black hole mergers, bringing the total count to 390 events.

Imagine a giant inflatable balloon with galaxies painted on it. As it inflates, the pattern stretches and neighboring dots move apart. The rate of that stretching is the Hubble constant. Astronomers usually catch light from distant stars and see how much it has reddened due to the stretching of space.

A huge bowl of water. Drop a stone into it — ripples spread across the surface. The fabric of spacetime works much the same way: when two massive stars merge, they create ripples — gravitational waves. These waves travel to Earth and are picked up by giant detectors like LIGO and Virgo.