Black Hole

In the grand theatre of the universe, few events rival the spectacle of two neutron stars colliding. These incredibly dense remnants of exploded stars spiral toward each other in a cosmic ballet, generating ripples in space-time, gravitational waves, and a shower of high-energy radiation across the cosmos. Scientists have been…

In the world of black holes, there are generally three size categories: stellar-mass black holes (about five to 50 times the mass of the sun), supermassive black holes (millions to billions of times the mass of the sun), and intermediate-mass black holes with masses somewhere in between. While we know…

(Image credit: Legacy Surveys / D. Lang (Perimeter Institute) / INAF / F. Onori) Astronomers have taken a detailed look at a rare and incredibly violent cosmic event resulting from an unfortunate star venturing too close to a supermassive black hole. The team behind the research hopes it could reveal…

The James Webb Space Telescope spies a black hole-powered quasar (pink, spiky dot in the center of the image) dating to the first billion years after the Big Bang. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, S. Lilly (ETH Zurich), D. Kashino (Nagoya University), J. Matthee (ETH Zurich), C. Eilers (MIT), R.…

A mysterious stream of neutrinos detected by a massive Antarctic observatory is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about how these elusive particles are formed in distant galaxies. The galaxy NGC 1068, instead of emitting strong gamma rays alongside its neutrinos as expected, reveals a strange mismatch...Read More

Two blind spots torture physicists: the birth of the universe and the center of a black hole. The former may feel like a moment in time and the latter a point in space, but in both cases the normally interwoven threads of space and time seem to stop short. These…

(Image credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images) Quick facts about black holes What they are: Places in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape How they form: When a massive star collapses in on itself Why they're black: Their gravitational pull is so extreme that…

This image, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows the molecular gas content of two galaxies involved in a cosmic collision. The one on the right hosts a quasar –– a supermassive black hole that is accreting material from its surroundings and releasing intense radiation directly into the…

An astonishing fact only known for the past few decades is that every big galaxy in the universe has a supermassive black hole at its heart. This was suspected in the 1980s, and observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, which has peered deep into the cores of galaxies all across…

The US Space Force has been struggling to achieve its technological goals, and Chief of Space Operations General B. Chance Saltzman told senators this week that civilian layoffs and budget cuts aren't helping matters at all.  Established during the first Trump administration in 2019, Space Force is a new branch…