In a strange, half-lost, piece of work Roger Penrose draws four figures dropping their lines into the depths of a black hole, and in doing so finds a new and hugely influential way to steal energy away from the heart of a spinning singularity.
The first detection of a pulsar and the first Nobel Prize in Physics for an astronomical detection.
200 years ago, Joseph Fourier had an idea that added a whole new dimension to physics.
Today’s paper takes you back to the time when anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background first shaped Observational Cosmology into the field it is today.
In 1972 astronomers witnessed the first full galaxy collision, not by looking up at the sky but by peering at a small screen in a very large box. The methods and implications are enshrined in modern astrophysics, but it is the results themselves that still truly amaze, stunning simple images of galaxies, playfully strewn and joyfully picked apart. A full exploration of a galaxy of a scale not matched before or since.
Today we’re talking about the history of gamma-ray astrophysics, starting with a very important observation from the late 1980s