When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn commission. An illustration shows an intermediate-mass black hole in space. | Credit: Robert Lea For decades, astronomers have searched with little joy for signs of “missing link” black holes—black holes with masses between “stellar-mass black holes” and “supermassive black holes.”… Read More »
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered the closest supermassive black hole ever seen to Earth, a cosmic titan “frozen in time.” As an elusive example of an “intermediate-mass black hole,” the object could serve as a missing link in understanding the connection between stellar mass and supermassive black holes. The black hole appears… Read More »
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have observed the dramatic “dance” between a supermassive black hole and two satellite galaxies. The observations could help scientists better understand how galaxies and supermassive black holes grew in the early universe. This particular supermassive black hole feeds off of its surrounding matter, powering a bright quasar… Read More »
The universe’s expansion rate is accelerating across the cosmos, driven by a mysterious force known as dark energy, but perhaps this acceleration isn’t happening at the boundaries of black holes, new research suggests. Rather than implying that dark energy does not move around the boundaries of black holes, this idea suggests that this mysterious force… Read More »
Quasars, the brightest objects in the universe, can serve as cosmic signposts that lead astronomers to pairs of supermassive black holes. While scientists are aware that supermassive black holes with masses of millions or even billions of times the sun lurk at the center of all large galaxies, detecting binary pairings of these cosmic titans… Read More »
Scientists have discovered that the Milky Way’s diffuse outer halo is devoid of any unusually large black holes. The discovery could spell bad news for theories that suggest dark matter, the universe’s most mysterious “stuff,” is composed of primordial black holes that formed in the early moments after the Big Bang. Dark matter is confusing… Read More »
A binary system containing a massive star and possibly a black hole, together being a source of intense X-rays, has been shown to be a smaller-scale example of some of the brightest quasars on Earth. Universe. New findings from an international team used NASA‘S Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft (IXPE), approximately 24,000 images of an… Read More »
A bright quasar powered by a supermassive black hole is blasting radiation that pushes surrounding gas clouds to produce winds reaching speeds of about 36 million miles per hour (58 million kilometers per hour). Oh, and the quasar is almost as old as the universe itself. The discovery, made by a team of scientists led… Read More »
A binary black hole system in an active galaxy about 4 billion light-years away was seen to brighten dramatically when one of the black holes briefly formed the accretion disk of the other into a double star. quasar. A quasar is the extremely active core of a distant galaxy. This activity is a product of… Read More »
Eventually all galaxies, including our Milky Way, will come to an end. So how do galaxies die? If you’re in the mood to destroy an entire galaxy, you have a few options depending on the level of destruction you want. Relating to: Monstrous black holes may have killed host galaxies in the early universe Option… Read More »