Black holes are terrifying, monstrous objects with immense gravity that causes them to consume everything that crosses their event horizons. Yet the physics-breaking power of the space-time ruptures is also part of their draw — sucking in scientists who want to study the role of black holes in sculpting galaxies and those searching for a […]
Probing a distant galaxy like a “cosmic crime scene” with the Hubble Space Telescope after a “tip-off” from the Chandra X-ray telescope, NASA scientists have discovered a strange black hole that is tipped onto its side. The sideways black hole was discovered in the galaxy NGC 5084, a lenticular (lens-shaped) galaxy located around 80 million […]
The first black hole ever photographed is still surprising researchers. Immortalized by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2019, M87* , was recently spotted emitting a massive gamma-ray flare. Studying it may help scientists figure out how particles behave near black holes. Matter falling toward a black hole forms an accretion disk — a hot, swirling […]
This image released by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, May 12, 2022, shows a black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way black hole is called Sagittarius A*, near the border of Sagittarius and Scorpius constellations. Credit: Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration via AP Scientists have spotted what appear to be […]
Astronomers have discovered a pair of young stars near the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. And despite living so close to the cosmic behemoth, they are likely to remain intact for a million years. While our pocket of the universe is home to a solitary sun, that’s not the norm. More […]
You’ve likely been there–snoozing on the couch after a large or decadent meal. A similar phenomenon is being observed with a black hole detected in the early universe. Using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) a team of scientists detected a black hole that is laying dormant after consuming too much matter. The sleepy […]
Nearly 35 years after its launch, the Hubble Space Telescope is still revealing new things about the cosmos. In a newly released series of images, scientists used Hubble to probe a quasar 2.5 billion light-years away. The results deepen our understanding of how these mysterious objects develop — but also reveal “weird things” in the […]
Nothing is supposed to escape a black hole’s event horizon — yet new research suggests it may secretly leak information. That leakage would appear in subtle signatures in gravitational waves, and now we know how to look for them, the study authors say. In 1976, Stephen Hawking rocked the astrophysics world with his discovery that […]
NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) has helped astronomers better understand the shapes of structures essential to a black hole – specifically, the disk of material swirling around it, and the shifting plasma region called the corona. The stellar-mass black hole, part of the binary system Swift J1727.8-1613, was discovered in the summer of 2023 […]
“In addition to stars, gas clouds can also be disrupted by SMBHs and their binaries,” they said in the same study. “The key difference is that the clouds can be comparable to or even larger than the binary separation, unlike stars, which are always much smaller. “ Looking at the results of a previous study […]
