Instead of the creamy, fluid texture you might expect ... And that blackness — the incredibly smooth and vast fabric of the dome of the sky — changes too. What was once flat and featureless ...

Shepherd’s material, for example, can change texture about as fast as an actual octopus, but it can only make one rough shape at a time. The animal, meanwhile, can produce far finer undulations ...

The shape of material around black holes has been seen ... infrared-biased sample because the satellite looked at all of the sky," says coauthor K.E. Saavik Ford, also a Research Associate in ...