Black Hole

Credit: Ohio State illustration by Lauren Fanfer Astronomers dub it “The Unicorn,” call it something special. Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes on record – and the closest one to Earth found to date. Researchers have dubbed it “The Unicorn,” in part because it is, so far,…

The newly-discovered stellar-mass black hole candidate is a binary companion to a nearby red giant called V723 Mon. An artist’s impression of the V723 Mon binary system. Image credit: Lauren Fanfer / Ohio State University. V723 Mon is a bright, evolved red giant located 1,500 light-years away in the constellation…

In this frame from a new visualization, a supermassive black hole weighing 200 million solar masses lies in the foreground. Its gravity distorts light from the accretion disk of a smaller companion black hole almost directly behind it, creating this surreal view. Different colors for the accretion disks make it…

A new NASA visualization traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from an accretion disk. It shows a hypnotic dance of a pair of orbiting black holes. These black holes have mass as same as the millions of times the Sun’s mass. Among two black holes, a…

“If you jump onto and then down from a carousel, you can steal energy from the carousel,” says co-author Salvatore Vitale. “These bosons do the same thing to a black hole.” Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT Certain ultralight bosons would be expected to put the brakes on black holes, but new…

A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun's mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas -- called an accretion disk -- that surrounds each…

Home News Science & Astronomy The spiral galaxy M81 is located about 12 million light-years away from Earth. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: Detlef Hartmann; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author…

Ultralight bosons — hypothetical particles with masses less than a billionth the mass of an electron — could be responsible for the Universe’s dark matter. In new research, an international team of physicists from the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium and Hong Kong searched for ultralight bosons using fast-spinning black…

Ultralight bosons are theoretical particles that have a mass of less than a billionth of the mass of an electron. As they rarely interact with their surroundings, they thus have far eluded searches to confirm their existence. If they are present, then the ultralight boson, such as axions, will form…

ScienceA massive effort to view a black hole in multiple ways is helping scientists untangle what happens when gravity is pushed to extremes. ByNadia Drake Published April 14, 2021 • 9 min read In the heart of a gargantuan galaxy 55 million light-years away, a black hole with the heft…