Black Hole

Astronomers have discovered nearly 100 examples of massive black holes shredding and devouring stars, almost all of them where you'd expect to find massive black holes: in the star-dense cores of massive galaxies. University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have now discovered the first instance of a massive black hole tearing…

An artist's illustration of two black holes spiraling together, creating gravitational waves in the process. (Image credit: NASA) Scientists have made the most accurate predictions yet of the elusive space-time disturbances caused when two black holes fly closely past each other. The new findings, published Wednesday (May 14) in the…

Powerful neutrinos from a distant galaxy hint at a surprising origin: helium atoms torn apart by UV light near a black hole, reshaping what we thought we knew about cosmic jets. In deep space, powerful neutrinos are typically found alongside bursts of gamma rays. But galaxy NGC 1068 is behaving…

A decade ago astrophysicists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), operated by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, managed to detect subtle ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves, released by a pair of black holes spiraling into each other, for the first time. That…

A bomb from a black hole would probably be the most destructive weapon in the universe. Hypothetically, it could be created by wrapping one of these cosmic monsters in mirrors and waiting for it to go “boom.” Now Hendrik Ulbricht of the University of Southampton in England and his colleagues…

A bold new quantum theory of gravity may finally bridge the long-standing rift between Einstein’s general relativity and quantum field theory. This potential “Theory of Everything” could answer some of the deepest mysteries in science—from black hole singularities to the origins of the universe—while inviting the global scientific community to…

Scientists have transformed new data from space telescopes into cosmic soundscapes, turning the mysterious activity around black holes into a symphony of the universe. These auditory representations, or sonifications , were created using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, James Webb Space Telescope and Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). By…

In a 2023 paper, Professor Heino Falcke and his colleagues at Radboud University showed that not only black holes, but also all other objects in the Universe can ‘evaporate’ via a process akin to Hawking radiation. After that publication, the authors received many questions about how long the process would…

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Through the looking glass: The discovery of a supermassive black hole not only challenges assumptions about where these galactic giants reside but also demonstrates the power of combining observations across the electromagnetic spectrum. As new telescopes…

This supermassive black hole was discovered thanks to the newly-identified tidal disruption event AT2024tvd, an astronomical phenomenon in which a star passes too close to a black hole and the extreme gravitational pull from the black hole shreds the star into thin streams of material. The tidal disruption event AT2024tvd.…