Black Hole

J. Robert Oppenheimer, now the protagonist of a much-anticipated film hitting theaters on July 21, is today most known for his scientific leadership of the U.S. Manhattan Project, the World War II–era crash program to build the first-ever atomic bombs. But just a few years earlier, Oppenheimer had found himself…

This NASA illustration shows the structure of a black hole jet as inferred by recent observations of the blazar Markarian 421 by the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). The jet is powered by an accretion disk, shown at the bottom of the image, which orbits and falls into the black…

In a first, astronomers have observed time ticking in slow motion in the early cosmos, confirming Albert Einstein’s century-old ideas about the reality-warping effects of our universe’s expansion. By tracking the flickering glows of luminous matter swirling through galaxies when the universe was a mere one billion years old (less…

An international team of astronomers used the state-of-the-art capability of VERA, a Japanese network of radio telescopes operated by NAOJ, to uncover valuable clues about how rapidly growing "young" supermassive black holes form, grow, and possibly evolve into more powerful quasars. It is now widely accepted that nearly every active…

A-bomb architect “was no Einstein,” historian says, but he did Nobel-level work on black holes...Read More

The brightest outpourings of energy in the universe are gamma ray bursts. They are typically born as stars or other objects collapse into black holes and send out blasts of high-energy photons billions of light years across the universe. Most commonly, the collapsing objects are massive stars that have burned…

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Imagine a future in which humans have built advanced spacecraft, capable of traveling at a significant percentage of the speed of light. Scientists have also become aware of a large black hole in our galactic neighborhood — now well within our reach. When a team of researchers assemble to travel…

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Approximately 200 years ago, according to an international team of researchers, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*)1, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, emerged out of a protracted period of dormancy. The team, led by CNRS researcher Frédéric Marin at the Astronomical Strasbourg Observatory (CNRS/University of Strasbourg),…