Black Hole

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…

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…