Black Hole

New research by physicists from the University of Oxford, Johns Hopkins University and the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris shows that collisions between particles free falling from infinity and a disk of material plunging off the retrograde innermost stable circular orbit of a rotating black hole is the unique astronomically…

Black holes are invisible to us unless they interact with something else. Some continuously eat gas and dust, and appear to glow brightly over time as matter falls in. But other black holes secretly lie in wait for years until a star comes close enough to snack on. A new…

The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe — a singular moment when space, time and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our universe emerged from something else — something more familiar and radical at…

An artist's concept of a supermassive black hole with a jet streaming outward at nearly the speed of light. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) In the face of eye-watering costs , long construction times and the Trump administration's slashing of federal science funding , physicists have proposed a cheaper alternative to the…

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…