An artist’s impression of a black hole, which is formed when very massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle (ESA / Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey / Nick Risinger / N Bartmann / Durham University) The largest known black hole in the Milky Way, excluding the supermassive black hole at the center of … Read more
Astronomers have imaged a feeding quasar powered by a black hole at the very edge of the universe, so far away that it was seen as it appeared less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The quasar, named SDSS J114816.64+525150.3, is powered by a supermassive black hole of more than 3 billion times … Read more
Scientists have discovered the gruesome secret behind the apparent youth of some stars at the heart of the Milky Way — stars that are participating in a kind of cosmic demolition derby around our Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*. Like a cosmic version of 17th-century serial killer Elizabeth Bathory, who … Read more
Event Horizon telescope Claim: A photo shared online in March 2024 shows the first image in polarized light of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way. Judgement: Rating: true Context: The photo showed the first image in polarized light of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way … Read more
A faltering supermassive black hole has alerted astronomers to a whole new type of black hole behavior. In 2020, a previously silent black hole suddenly erupted at the heart of a galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth, and with a mass equivalent to 50 million suns, brightening the material around it by a factor … Read more
Astronomers have captured the first image of polarized light and the magnetic fields surrounding Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milly Way. The historic observation made with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has revealed that the neatly arranged magnetic fields resemble those around the supermassive black hole at … Read more
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered an ‘extremely red’ supermassive black hole growing in the shadowy early universe. The red hue of the supermassive black hole, seen as it appeared about 700 million years after the Big Bang, is the result of the expanding universe. As the universe moves outward in … Read more
Astronomers have discovered one of the most powerful black hole eruptions ever – and this immense explosion, which took place almost 4 billion years ago, formed a pattern of stars in clusters that resemble jewelry. The star chain adorns a huge cluster of hundreds of galaxies called SDSS J1531; this body is located about 3.8 … Read more
A newly developed solution to the equations at the heart of Albert Einstein‘s most revolutionary theory suggests that hypothetical stars called “nestars” could be made of stacked gravitational stars, or “gravastars,” like Russian tea dolls, also known as matryoshka dolls. One of the most impressive things about Einstein’s 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity, is … Read more