Chandra Reveals X-Ray Binary Stars at the Galactic Center
The center of our Milky Way galaxy is about twenty-five thousand light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. At the core…
Black Hole
Webb Space Telescope Will Capture Light From First Generation Stars
The first stars in the universe blazed to life about 200 to 400 million years after the big bang. Observing those very first individual stars…
Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole May Have ‘Wandering’ Siblings
Astronomers are beginning to understand what happens when black holes get the urge to roam the Milky Way. Typically, a supermassive black hole (SMBH) exists…
Is Dark Matter Composed of Primordial Black Holes?
Astronomers studying the motions of galaxies and the character of the cosmic microwave background radiation came to realize in the last century that most of…
Unprecedented ‘Dissection’ of Twin Galaxies in Final Stages of Merging
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have completed an unprecedented “dissection” of twin galaxies in the final stages of merging. The new study, led…
Astrophysicists Test Theories of Gravity with Black Hole Shadows
Can we tell black holes apart? Astrophysicists at Goethe University Frankfurt answer this question by computing images of feeding non-Einsteinian black holes: At present it…
Dense Stellar Clusters Are Home to Black Hole ‘Megamergers’
Black holes in dense stellar clusters could combine repeatedly to form objects bigger than anything a single star could produce. When LIGO’s twin detectors first…
Astrophysicists Discover a Dozen Black Holes Orbiting Sgr A*
A Columbia University-led team of astrophysicists has discovered a dozen black holes gathered around Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole in the center…
Astronomers View Black Hole Jets Deep Inside Perseus A
An international team of researchers has imaged newly forming jets of plasma from a massive black hole with unprecedented accuracy. Radio images made with a…
Astronomers Dedicate the Birth of a New Black Hole to Stephen Hawking
One of the MASTER Global Robotic Net telescopes (MSU) located on Tenerife (Spain, Canary Islands) helped the scientists observe the gamma-ray burst caused by the…
Radio Echoes of a Black Hole Feeding on a Star Detected
Signals suggest a black hole emits a jet of energy proportional to the stellar material it gobbles up. On Nov. 11, 2014, a global network…
Outbursts From Supermassive Black Hole Transform Exoplanets
A team of astrophysicists and planetary scientists has predicted that Neptune-like planets located near the center of the Milky Way galaxy have been transformed into…
Astronomers Capture Clearest Infrared Image To Date of the Center of the Milky Way
A research team has published a new study lead by Pat Roche, professor of astrophysics at The University of Oxford, and Chris Packham, associate professor…
These Unusual Black Holes Offer an Infinite Number of Possible Futures
In the real world, your past uniquely determines your future. If a physicist knows how the universe starts out, she can calculate its future for…
S0-2 Will Test Einstein Theory and Potentially Reveal New Gravitational Models
Astronomers have the “all-clear” for an exciting test of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, thanks to a new discovery about S0-2’s star status. Up until…
New Simulation Provides First Hints of What Supermassive Black Hole Mergers Will Look Like
A new simulation of supermassive black holes–the behemoths at the centers of galaxies–uses a realistic scenario to predict the light signals emitted in the surrounding…
Chandra Shows Supermassive Black Holes Are Outgrowing Their Galaxies
The biggest black holes in the Universe are growing faster than the rate of stars being formed in their galaxies, according to two new studies…
ALMA Reveals Rotating Dense Molecular Torus Around an Active Supermassive Black Hole
High resolution observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) imaged a rotating dusty gas torus around an active supermassive black hole. The existence of…