black holes

A black hole with about 17 billion times the mass of our sun has turned up in another remote galaxy. Astronomers now think these mass-eating monsters may not be so rare after all.

Behind the headlines and news conferences announcing the discovery were decades of hard work, hundreds of scientists and more than a billion dollars in taxpayer funds.

A U.S.-led team says it has seen waves in space-time from two black holes merging together. It is the first time humanity has directly detected such waves.

Physicist Charles Townes died Tuesday. He was a key inventor of the laser and won the Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1964. But his career didn't end there.