Black Hole Week is in full swing and to celebrate, NASA has explained how its next big astronomical instrument, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will hunt for small black holes dating back to the Big Bang. When we think of black holes, we tend to imagine enormous cosmic monsters, such as stellar-mass black holes … Read more
Scientists have used artificial intelligence to construct a three-dimensional model of an energetic outburst, or outburst, that occurred around the Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). This 3D model could help scientists get a clearer picture of the tumultuous environment that forms around supermassive black holes in general. The material swirling around … Read more
A black hole illustration with two black holes within one. Black holes are monstrous and monolithic regions of space and time that have captured the imagination of humanity. Some are created by the death and collapse of a massive star – and yet no star can produce the most enormous black holes. These are the … Read more
A new study of a rare and short-lived type of galaxy has revealed that such objects harbor dormant supermassive black holes that briefly awaken to tear apart a massive star and devour its remains like a giant cosmic breakfast. ‘Compact Symmetric Objects’ or CSOs are active galaxies from which two jets emerge at almost the … Read more
Two supermassive black holes found in collisionally created ‘fossil galaxies’ are so massive that they refuse to collide and merge. The discovery could explain why supermassive black hole mergers, while theoretically predicted, have never been observed over time. The supermassive black hole system is located in the elliptical galaxy B2 0402+379. Together, the two black … Read more
A team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to discover the most distant and oldest black hole ever as it feasts on its host galaxy. The discovery could be a huge step forward in understanding how supermassive black holes reached masses millions of billions of times greater than the Sun in … Read more