Tagged: black hole

In 2019, astronomers released the first direct image of a black hole, a feat that made headlines and boggled minds all over the world. The black hole was a supermassive one – millions of times our sun’s mass – at the heart of a relatively...

Astronomers continue to develop computer simulations to help future observatories better home in on black holes, the most elusive inhabitants of the universe. Though black holes likely exist abundantly in the universe, they are notoriously hard to see. Scientists did not capture the first radio...

Scientists have discovered one of the smallest black holes on record—and the closest one to Earth found to date. Researchers have dubbed it ‘The Unicorn,’ in part because it is, so far, one of a kind, and in part because it was found in the...

Scientists have long theorized that supermassive black holes can wander through space—but catching them in the act has proven difficult. Now, researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian have identified the clearest case to date of a supermassive black hole in motion....

A paper by the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) Director Ooguri Hirosi and Project Researcher Matthew Dodelson on the string theoretical effects outside the black hole photon sphere has been selected for the “Editors’ Suggestion” of the journal...

As first pointed out by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild, black holes bend space-time to an extreme degree due to their extraordinary concentration of mass, and heat up the matter in their vicinity so that it begins to glow. New Zealand physicist Roy Kerr showed...

At the center of most galaxies are black holes so massive—up to several billion times the mass of our sun—that they have earned the descriptor “supermassive.” Compare this to your run-of-the-mill stellar-mass black hole, a measly 10 to 100 times our sun’s mass. Understanding these...

A 50-year-old theory that began as speculation about how an alien civilization could use a black hole to generate energy has been experimentally verified for the first time in a Glasgow research lab. In 1969, British physicist Roger Penrose suggested that energy could be generated...

Astronomers from China have performed a comprehensive multiwavelength monitoring of a low-mass black hole X-ray binary system known as MAXI J1820+070. Results of this study, published April 21 on the arXiv pre-print repository, shed more light on the properties of this source. In general, X-ray...

P172+18 is the most distant radio-loud quasar ever found. It could teach us how galaxies form and evolve. If you’re fascinated by the idea of looking back in time, just look up at the sky. If you stare at the moon, you’re seeing the orb...