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Black holes can not only rip stars apart, but they can also trigger star formation, as scientists have now seen in a nearby dwarf galaxy. At the centers of most, if not all, large galaxies are supermassive black holes with masses that are millions to billions of times that of Earth’s sun. For instance, at … Read more
Scientists have for the first time confirmed the merger of two highly eccentric black holes. Egg-shaped eccentric orbits form when two black holes spiral towards each other and collide under each other’s strong gravitational influence. Therefore, highly eccentric orbits may suggest black holes repeatedly snack on other black holes in densely populated areas, like the … Read more
Black holes located in dwarf galaxies usually stop star formation, but now one has been seen seeding new stars through a huge plume of ionised gas Space 19 January 2022 By Alex Wilkins A dwarf galaxy known as Hen 2-10 NASA A black hole at the centre of a dwarf galaxy has birthed new stars … Read more
Because we can’t see black holes, it’s hard to know exactly how many are out there in the big, wide Universe. But that doesn’t mean we have no means of trying to figure it out. Stellar-mass black holes are the collapsed cores of dead massive stars, and new research incorporating how these stars and binaries … Read more
Ever since scientists made the first detection of gravitational waves from a pair of colliding black holes in 2015, evidence has been growing that the Universe ought to be full of them. Every massive event – every black hole or neutron star merger, every supernova – should have sent gravitational waves ringing out across … Read more
A composite image of the effects of our Milky Way galaxy’s monster black hole. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, and Gerald Cecil (UNC-Chapel Hill); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)) The supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is leaking. The Milky Way’s central black hole, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), has … Read more
The dwarf galaxy Mrk 462. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Dartmouth Coll./J. Parker & R. Hickox; Optical/IR: Pan-STARRS) A newly discovered “mini” supermassive black hole could help reveal some of the secrets behind the biggest black holes in the cosmos. Researchers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory recently discovered a monstrous black hole that was “buried” in dust … Read more
Astronomers have found evidence of a black hole snacking on a star in data gathered back in the 1980s, according to new research. The researchers say that they have identified the signature of such an event in data gathered during the 1980s, thanks to a pair of high school interns from Massachusetts. When a star … Read more
Astronomers have long suspected that merging black holes can give the resulting larger black hole a massive boost of speed, and have finally spotted this happening Space 11 January 2022 By Leah Crane When a pair of black holes merge, the resulting larger black hole can be sent hurtling away at extraordinary speeds – and … Read more
Because they emit nothing we can detect, there are many things about black holes we simply do not know. Amongst the most perplexing are supermassive black holes, millions to billions of times the mass of our Sun. Since black holes form from the cores of massive dead individual stars, how do supermassive behemoths grow so … Read more