Shao-Peng Tang

Imagine a bridge with its middle ripped out: cars on the other side would be a surprise. That's how astronomers long viewed black holes with masses from 50 to 130 solar masses: the stars that could produce them explode as pair-instability supernovae.

The core of a neutron star can be likened to a taut string of super-nuclear density. Sound traveling along it is the oscillation of pressure, whose speed $$c_s$$ betrays the stiffness of matter. New research shows that this cosmic string does not hum monotonically.

In the depths of a massive neutron star, where a teaspoon of matter weighs as much as a mountain, quarks are squeezed to unimaginable proximity.

A hundred years ago, Einstein predicted gravitational waves, and Schwarzschild found the first solution for a black hole.

A detective story unfolded in the GWTC-5 catalog. Hundreds of signals from merging black holes, captured by the detectors of Rainer Weiss and his colleagues, held the secret to the origin of the most massive and rapidly spinning stellar-scale objects.