Black Hole

Home News Science & Astronomy Of all the far-out concepts in astronomy, black holes may be the weirdest. A region of space where matter is so tightly packed that nothing, not even light itself, can escape, these dark behemoths present a pretty terrifying prospect, too. With all the normal rules…

Home News Science & Astronomy The feeding process at the center of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 1566. (Image credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)) How do you feed an all-consuming, cosmic glutton that is a black hole? With long, wispy filaments of dust, according to researchers who…

Space 2 August 2021 By Leah Crane Black holes follow the no-hair theorem Bransgrove A., et al./American Physical Society Black holes with “hair” will quickly go bald. A key theoretical prediction about black holes called the no-hair theorem states that an isolated black hole can be described by just three…

In a short span of time, astronomers have taken us closer to black holes than ever with unprecedented images of the cosmic giants. Now, for the first time, scientists have seen the phenomena that takes place behind them. As part of the breakthrough, researchers witnessed and captured the light from…

Seen nearly edgewise, the turbulent disk of gas churning around a black hole takes on a crazy double-humped appearance. The black hole’s extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, producing the warped image. The black hole’s extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts light…

Artist impression of disk of material rotating around a supermassive black hole. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF What happens inside a black hole stays inside a black hole, but what happens inside a black hole’s “sphere of influence” – the innermost region of a galaxy where a black hole’s gravity is the dominant…

A researcher at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax was part of a team of scientists that observed light coming from behind a black hole for the very first time, confirming a prediction from famous physicist Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. While scientists have seen X-ray emissions around black holes…

If you know what a black hole is, you're probably aware that it can contain as much mass as billions of stars, compressed into a much smaller space, and have such a powerful gravitational pull that even light can't escape its grasp. But even though it's not possible to see…

Using ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes, astronomers have observed X-ray flares emitted from around the supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy called I Zwicky 1 (I Zw 1); further analysis of the flares has revealed short flashes of photons consistent with the re-emergence of emission from behind…

Stanford astrophysicist Dan Wilkins and his colleagues were studying a supermassive black hole when something caught their attention—​​ a series of bright flares of X-rays. The emission of such high-energy photons from a black hole was intriguing, but not necessarily unprecedented. Yet it was interesting enough for Wilkins to take…