Black Hole

Home News Science & Astronomy An illustration of a black hole. (Image credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images) When astronomers discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, they theorized that some force must be pushing things farther apart and overcoming gravity, which should be slowing things down.…

Artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole. Cosmological coupling allows black holes to grow in mass without consuming gas or stars. Credit: UH Manoa Searching through existing data spanning 9 billion years, a team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa has uncovered the first…

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A lab-made black hole is beyond current technology but could be possible one day Credit: Jennifer Lamberth/EyeEm/Getty Images In the popular imagination, black holes are voracious monstrosities gulping down anything in their vicinity. That is why there are occasional worries that physicists might accidentally or intentionally create one, perhaps inside a…

Clues to a black hole's origins can be found in the way it spins, which is especially true for binaries — when two black holes circle close together before merging. The spin and tilt of the respective black holes just before they merge can reveal whether they arose from a…

In this illustration, light from a smaller black hole (left) curves around a larger black hole and forms an almost-mirror image on the other side. The gravity of a black hole can warp the fabric of space itself, such that light passing close to the black hole will follow a…

The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round. Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The same holds for black holes — or, to be more precise, the event horizons of black holes…

We've all heard of black holes, and while they sound pretty terrifying, the odds of us somehow getting sucked up into one are pretty slim. But if you want to know what it would be like, well, you're in luck, because there's a simulator that just does that - and…

Home News Science & Astronomy Blackholes in the hearts of galaxies are usually shrouded in dust. (Image credit: Peter Z. Harrington) Black holes residing at the center of galaxies produce way more energy than scientists previously thought, a new study has revealed.  These so-called active galactic nuclei devour huge amounts…

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the moment an enormous black hole twisted a star into a doughnut shape as it was “violently swallowing it”. Located 300 million light-years away, the black hole is at the core of a galaxy called ESO 583-G004. Astronomers used Hubble’s powerful instruments to study…