Black Hole

Watching X-rays flung out into the universe by the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away, Stanford University astrophysicist Dan Wilkins noticed an intriguing pattern. He observed a series of bright flares of X-rays -- exciting, but not unprecedented -- and then, the telescopes…

Home News Science & Astronomy (Image credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY) Imagine a galaxy reflected in a fun house hall of mirrors. You'd see the galaxy, repeated again and again, with each image becoming more grotesque and distorted. That's how the universe looks near the event horizon of a black…

When gas falls into a black hole, it releases an enormous amount of energy and spews electromagnetic radiation in all directions, making these objects some of the brightest in the known universe. But scientists have only ever been able to see light and other radiation from a supermassive black hole when…

Home News Each bright spot in this image, the first all-sky image by eRosita, is black hole or a neutron star. (Image credit: Jeremy Sanders/Hermann Brunner/Andrea Merloni/Eugene Churazov/Marat Gilfanov/IKI/eSASS/MPE)A German-built space telescope is creating the most detailed map of black holes and neutron stars across our universe, revealing more than…

In galactic centers, black holes can be brought to each others’ proximity by dynamic processes, resulting in mergers. It is also possible that black holes formed in previous mergers encounter new black holes, resulting in so-called hierarchical mergers. Until now, such events have only been hinted. Now, scientists at the…

Black holes aren't what they eat. Einstein's general relativity predicts that no matter what a black hole consumes, its external properties depend only on its mass, rotation and electric charge. All other details about its diet disappear. Astrophysicists whimsically call this the no-hair conjecture. (Black holes, they say, "have no…

The competition will become clearly one-sided as the black hole of value that is bitcoin absorbs everything around it. Bitcoin was never going to be a store of value… until it was. It was never going to become a reserve currency, right up until the point when major businesses and…

Space 26 July 2021 By Leah Crane Black holes can accelerate stars to near the speed of light Vladimir Arndt / Alamy Stars that collide after being sped up by orbiting close to supermassive black holes may be so bright they rival the most powerful supernovae, some of the brightest…

Two instances of black hole-neutron star collision events have been detected using the Advanced LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors, details of which have been published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Previous gravitational wave detections have spotted black holes colliding, and neutron stars merging, this is the first time that…

Centaurus A is the nearest radio galaxy that lies about 12 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). There lies a black hole at the center of the galaxy with a mass of 55 million suns. In 2019, EHT released the first picture of the black…