Black Hole

Artist’s impression of binary black holes about to collide. Credit: Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) With the growing catalog of binary black hole mergers, researchers can study the overall spin properties of these systems to uncover how they formed and evolved. Recent work paints…

Everything junior Missouri Senator Josh Hawley does, day in day out, is an exercise in sneering opportunism. Maybe he loves playing the right-wing bad boy, gobbling up airtime, stoking cultural outrage, alongside the relentless smirking he does into the black hole of whatever he imagines his future consists of. We…

Messier 87 (M87) is a giant galaxy located 55 million light-years away from Earth. The galaxy has 12,000 globular clusters and a black hole called M87* with six and a half billion sun masses. In 2019, EHT released the first picture of the black hole at the center of galaxy…

The first rendered image of a black hole, illuminated by infalling matter. In this study, researchers have proposed a model where these objects can gain mass without the addition of matter: they can cosmologically couple to the growth of the universe itself. Credit: Jean-Pierre Luminet, “Image of a Spherical Black…

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…