Black Hole

PARIS - Astronomers announced on Aug 12 they had discovered a new type of astronomical object called a “black hole star”, potentially solving a mystery involving strange red dots spotted in the early universe. The object looks like a star the size of our solar system, but produces 100 billion…

The strange bright red dots are visible in nearly every image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). However, the frequency of their cosmic cameos didn’t make them any more explicable to astronomers. But after four years of analysis, researchers now believe they know why it was so difficult…

This view of the western X-ray sky from eROSITA shows tons of cosmic X-ray sources in different energy bands. (Image credit: MPE, J. Sanders) Astronomers have nearly doubled the number of known cosmic X-ray sources, offering the most comprehensive public view yet of the universe's hottest and most energetic objects.…

This artist’s concept visualizes a tidal disruption event, which occurs when a star passes fatally close to a supermassive black hole. Crumbs of the splintering star heat up as they swirl around the black hole, creating a glow astronomers can see from far across the cosmos, and the black hole…

The history of networking is full of tools that repurposed solutions to very different kinds of problems first. Wi-Fi’s origins trace back, in part, to a team of Australian radio astronomers trying to detect signals from evaporating black holes. But the data-processing tools they’d developed also proved capable at extracting…

University of Maryland astronomers have identified a dormant supermassive black hole positioned far from the center of its host galaxy. The discovery marks the first time scientists have found an inactive black hole at such a great distance from a galactic core. Because the black hole was not actively consuming…

Artist impression of SwiftJ1727 with donor jet clouds. Credit: John A. Paice & Noel Castro Segura et al, (2026) A black hole caught feeding on a nearby star kept spitting matter into space even after its outburst nearly faded away. Astronomers led by the University of Warwick have uncovered new…

After decades of searching, astronomers have pinpointed the first of an estimated 10,000 stellar-mass black holes thought to lurk in Omega Centauri, the most massive stellar system in the Milky Way found so far, with a stellar mass of 3.6 million solar masses. Whitaker et al. found Omega Centauri’s first…

(Main) An illustration of a feeding supermassive black hole (Inset) the heart of the galaxy NGC4696 in a combined view from the JWST and Hubble. (Image credit: Robert Lea/ NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/J. Hlavacek-Larrondo, et al. 2026) Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have been given a glimpse of the…

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, are giving astronomers their clearest look yet at how supermassive black holes obtain the gas they need to grow. The images reveal long strands of gas linking a galaxy's hot outer atmosphere to a rapidly rotating disk surrounding its central…