At the beginning of time and the center of every black hole lies a point of infinite density called a singularity. To explore these enigmas, we take what we know about space, time, gravity, and quantum mechanics and apply it to a place where all of those things simply break down. There is, perhaps, nothing in the universe that challenges the imagination more. Physicists still believe that if they can come up with a coherent explanation for what actually happens in and around singularities, something revelatory will emerge, perhaps a new understanding of what space and time are made of. In the late 1960s, some physicists speculated that singularities might be surrounded by a region of churning chaos, where space and time haphazardly grow and shrink. Charles Misner of the University of Maryland called it a 'Mixmaster universe,' after what was then a popular line of kitchen appliances. If an astronaut were to fall into a black hole, 'one can imagine it mixing up the astronaut's body parts in the way that a mixmaster or eggbeater mixes up the yolk and white of an egg,' Kip Thorne, a Nobel Prize'winning physicist, later wrote....

One of the most powerful objects in the universe is a radio quasar ' a spinning black hole spraying out highly energetic particles. Come too close to one, and you'd get sucked in by its gravitational pull, or burn up from the intense heat surrounding it. But ironically, studying black holes and their jets can give researchers insight into where potentially habitable worlds might be in the universe. Black holes are massive, astrophysical objects that use gravity to pull surrounding objects into them. Active black holes have a pancake-shaped structure around them called an accretion disk, which contains hot, electrically charged gas. The plasma that makes up the accretion disk comes from farther out in the galaxy. When two galaxies collide and merge, gas is funneled into the central region of that merger. Some of that gas ends up getting close to the newly merged black hole and forms the accretion disk. Black holes and their disks can rotate, and when they do, they drag space and time with them ' a concept that's mind-boggling and very hard to grasp conceptually. But black holes are important to study because they produce enormous amounts of energy that can influence galaxies....

New research from a team at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring the Milky Way, hosts a gravitational structure hundreds of thousands of times the mass of the sun: a potential supermassive black hole. The most widely accepted theory of galactic evolution holds that supermassive black holes are found only in the largest galaxies, such as the Milky Way. Until now, there was no reason to imagine that a small cluster like the Large Magellanic Cloud could host one. When x-ray telescopes or observatories have been trained on smaller clusters like the Large Magellanic Cloud, they have found no signatures associated with black hole activity. But then came the hypervelocity stars. For nearly 20 years, astronomers have spotted fast-traveling stars with enough acceleration to be ejected from their own galaxies. While a traditional star moves at about 100 kilometers per second, a hypervelocity star travels up to 10 times faster. Experts think such stars appear by being 'catapulted outward' by a supermassive gravitational structure under the Hills mechanism'which is where a binary star system interacts with a black hole, with one star captured by the black hole and the other flung away from it....

Sometimes politics resembles one of the weirder branches of modern physics or a fantasy version of biology. Time may seem to run backwards; solid things turn out to be insubstantial; black holes swallow up the light; the dead may walk the Earth, ghouls crawl out of cleft rocks, velociraptors not only reappear but learn to speak and, alarmingly, open doors. That is how American politics feels at the moment. By and large, however, Newtonian physics and traditional biology still apply, and that is worth remembering as we watch the Trump administration's circus of transgression, vindictiveness, and sometimes mere folly. Like most administrations, including those of considerably more sedate chief executives, that of the 47th president has decided to way overinterpret its mandate. The brute facts remain: Donald Trump received a plurality of votes (albeit a decisive majority in the Electoral College); the Republican Party is holding on to the House of Representatives by a hair and has a slim majority in the Senate. The administration may hate civil servants and seek to undermine their job security, but it will discover that it needs them to keep airplanes flying safely, the financial system functioning, drugs safe for use, and food fit for consumption....