A bold theory links the universe’s brightest flashes to gravity pushed to its absolute limits

Early microwave-sky maps hint at heavyweight threads in space—and how they might have helped build galaxies

How a swirling disk can park a small companion into a steady orbit—and turn it into a constant gravitational-wave beacon

How the final moments of merging stars and black holes act like a precision clock—and why modeling them is so hard (and so rewarding)

When the sky looked oddly even, astronomers imagined a vast sphere of burst-makers surrounding our galaxy