Black Hole

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…

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…