ligo

Imagine spending 40 years and more than a billion dollars on a gamble. That's what one U.S. government science agency did. It's now paying off big time, with new discoveries about black holes and exotic neutron stars coming almost every week LIGO, with one observation facility near Hanford, Wash.

The world is seeing the first-ever image of a black hole Wednesday, as an international team of researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope project released their look at the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87 (M87). The image shows a dark disc "outlined by emission from hot gas swirling around it under the influence of strong gravity near its event horizon," the consortium said.

On April 1, scientists will officially restart their search for gravitational waves after a year spent making improvements to massive twin detectors. Discoveries should soon start rolling in, and when they do, there's a good chance the news will be translated into a Native American language called Blackfoot, or Siksika.

The scientific communityis on fire this week. And a physics research lab in Washington is partly to credit. For the first time, scientists observed a…

Scientists in southeast Washington state announced Wednesday that they had detected two black holes revolving around each other and then morphing into…