Black Hole

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…

Artist’s impression of a collection of black holes in the core of a star cluster. Credit: ESA/Hubble, N. Bartmann Since 2015, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has detected about 85 pairs of black holes crashing into each other. We now know that Einstein was right: gravitational waves are generated by these systems…

Powered by supermassive black holes swallowing matter in the centers of galaxies, active galactic nuclei are the most powerful compact steady sources of energy in the universe. The brightest active galactic nuclei have long been known to far outshine the combined light of the billions of stars in their host…

A star is being consumed by a nearby supermassive black hole. Astronomers call this a tidal disruption event (TDE). What makes this TDE a very rare TDE is that as the black hole rips apart the star, two jets of material moving with almost the speed of light are launched…

Supermassive black holes are found deep within the enormous galaxies at the center of galaxy clusters. The atmospheres of galaxy clusters are packed with plasma and are extremely hot—about 50 million degrees Celsius—but these temperatures typically decrease over time, allowing for the formation of new stars. In a process known…

Astronomers have observed the effect of a distant feeding black hole that is burping out tremendous amounts of energy and blowing huge cosmic bubbles in its surrounding material.  The observations of the galactic cluster MS0735 located 2.6 billion light-years away could reveal new information about mysterious cavities or "radio bubbles"…

Home News Science & Astronomy An illustration of two merging black holes. (Image credit: Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)) Black holes are some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe. This is partially because  the equations of general relativity that we use to…

A disk of hot gas swirls around a black hole in this illustration. The stream of gas stretching to the right is what remains of a star that was pulled apart by the black hole. A cloud of hot plasma (gas atoms with their electrons stripped away) above the black…