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Only a handful of supermassive black holes have been confirmed by scientists, but the universe could be filled with billions of these gravitational giants. Theoretically, if you compress a sufficient amount of matter into a small enough space, it will create such a powerful gravitational field that nothing — not even light — can escape … Read more
Take three black holes and throw them into the disk surrounding a supermassive black hole and things get really weird, really fast.
A dance of death is taking place at the heart of a galaxy in the distant Universe. Some 10 billion light-years away, two supermassive black holes are locked in an orbit so tight that they will collide with each other and form one much larger black hole in the relatively short time of just 10,000 … Read more
Young stars surround a supermassive black hole in a stunning new image captured by an instrument designed to search for dark energy. The image shows a face-on view of the galaxy NGC 1566, which is nicknamed the Spanish Dancer for its dramatic swirling shape. The photograph comes from an instrument called the Dark Energy Camera, … Read more
An object 681 million light-years away might look like one glorious, exquisite mess, but there’s a lot more going on that a first glance indicates. The object showcased in a new Hubble image – called IC 2431 – is not one galaxy, but three, coming together in a massive galactic merger that will one day … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope will study the weirdly flickering black hole at the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way, which has proved elusive for existing telescopes to explore. Webb will join the efforts of numerous telescopes to understand the nature of the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*, whose tendency to flare up … Read more
A supermassive black hole masked by a cloud of cosmic dust was found at the center of an active galaxy in new images from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The galaxy, known as Messier 77 or NGC 1068, is a barred spiral galaxy located about 47 million light-years from Earth, in the constellation Cetus. Taken … Read more
Astronomers have just found an absolute monster of a galaxy. Lurking some 3 billion light-years away, Alcyoneus is a giant radio galaxy reaching 5 megaparsecs into space. That’s 16.3 million light-years long, and constitutes the largest known structure of galactic origin. The discovery highlights our poor understanding of these colossi, and what drives their … 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
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