Black Hole

Astronomers used a UC Santa Cruz-led AI system to detect a rare supernova, SN 2023zkd, within hours of its explosion, allowing rapid follow-up observations before the fleeting event faded. Evidence suggests the blast was triggered by a massive star's catastrophic encounter with a black hole companion, either partially swallowing the…

Policy can seem like opening a blind box: you’ll get something, but probably not what you want. Jim Chalmer’s economic roundtable was no different. Every option is on the table, yes, but what we’ll get is as unknown as what is driving the Labubu craze.  First, the positives. Holding the roundtable is at…

Topline Astronomers have detected what may be the most massive black hole ever observed. It was found within what’s known as the Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy — one of the most massive galaxies known — which is so large it distorts spacetime into a near-ring of light. The Cosmic Horseshoe gravitational…

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 122, Issue 34, August 2025. SignificancePowerful radio jets released by accreting supermassive black holes are a significant source of magnetic energy in the Universe. By cosmic noon (redshift 2 to 3), the jet-inflated radio lobes extend beyond their host galaxies and inject…

Country-size array of radio antennas could trace ultra–high-energy particles back to supernovae and black holes...Read More

Artistic depiction of the explosive interaction between the black hole and the massive nearby star (blue). As the separation between the star and the black hole decreased, the black hole’s intense gravity pulled gas and dust off of the star into a disk. Before the star was able to swallow…

Mysterious red galaxies from the universe’s dawn may trace back to rare, slow-spinning dark matter halos, creating extreme conditions that sparked rapid star or black hole growth. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com Astronomers may have uncovered the secret behind the mysterious “little red dots” seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.…

An image showing a planet close to a black hole. (Image source: Kyraxys - Pixabay) Artificial intelligence managed to observe, for the first time, a star exploding during its encounter with a black hole. And this is a major advance for the field of astronomy and AI. Technological advances have…

In his new paper, Professor Jonathan Tan, an astrophysicist at the University of Virginia and the Chalmers University of Technology, proposes that Population III.1 supermassive stars were progenitors of supermassive black holes in the early Universe; high energy photons from the stars ionized the surrounding hydrogen gas far out into…

An artist's illustration of the black hole IGR J17091‑3624, showing material swirling around its inner region, called the corona, which emits bright X-rays detected by NASA's Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). (Image credit: NASA/Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt) A black hole’s bizarre "heartbeat" is forcing astronomers to reconsider how these cosmic heavyweights behave.…