Black Hole

Since the first observation of black hole mergers by LIGO in 2015, astronomers have been repeatedly surprised by their large masses. These mergers emit no light, still are observed through their emission of gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime that were predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Normally,…

Since the first observation of merging black holes in 2015, astrophysicists have been repeatedly surprised by their large masses. They originally expected that black holes would have masses less than about 40 times that of the Sun. The LIGO and Virgo observatories, however, have found many black holes with masses…

Home News Science & Astronomy An artist’s impression of an Earthlike exoplanet orbiting a star similar to our own sun. (Image credit: NASA Ames, JPL-Caltech and T. Pyle) We now have a rough sketch of what the next decade could bring in astronomy and astrophysics. Today (Nov. 4), the U.S.…

Over the past 6 years, gravitational wave observatories have been detecting black hole mergers, verifying a major prediction of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity. But there is a problem -- many of these black holes are unexpectedly large. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Hawai?i at M?noa,…

For those interested in space science — or even science fiction — astronomers have been full of fascinating news in the past few years. As technology improves, researchers have been able to discover even more celestial objects than we ever imagined, from comets and asteroids zipping through our solar system…

The Andromeda galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy 2.5 million light-years from Earth. Otherwise known as Messier 31, it hosts a double nucleus, which is well-explained by a massive disk of apse-aligned stellar orbits about a supermassive black hole, a configuration astronomers call an eccentric nuclear disk. In a new…

Graphic showing the orbit of stars around a supermassive black hole before, left, and after, right, a gravitational "kick." Credit: Steven Burrows/JILA When two galaxies collide, the supermassive black holes at their cores release a devastating gravitational "kick," similar to the recoil from a shotgun. New research led by CU…

Home News An illustration showing a black hole sucking in material from its accretion disk. The recently detected Camel explosion could have been a black hole's birth. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) In October 2020, astronomers detected an enormous, ancient explosion tearing through a galaxy several billion light-years from Earth. The blast…

Variations in the brightness of light seen from around a stellar-mass black hole in the binary system MAXI J1820+070 were caused by a huge warp in its accretion disk, according to a paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The discovery was made from…

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