Black Hole

An image of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way dubbed Sagittarius A* (Image credit: Event Horizon Telescope collaboration) A powerful new technique is poised to revolutionize how astronomers observe black holes, by producing sharp, multicolored images that could reveal their dynamic evolution in real time.…

Black holes are nature’s ultimate shadow dwellers—silent, invisible unless they interact with their surroundings. Some continuously devour gas and dust, glowing eerily as matter spirals inward. Others, however, lie in wait for years, lurking undetected until an unsuspecting star drifts too close. A new study utilizing NASA, ESA, and ground-based…

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.…