Tag: Black Holes

Cosmic echoes from some of the universe’s most violent collisions are far more nuanced than scientists had realized, according to new research. Like the lingering chime of a struck bell, tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime are created when massive objects like black holes spiral toward each other and merge into a single, larger black hole. These ripples are known as “gravitational waves,” and astronomers rely on theoretical models to decode the waves’ faint signals, both in the final moments leading up to the merger and in the aftermath.…

Dark matter may have contributed to the formation of giant black holes in the early universe, researchers propose in a new paper. More observations, especially with the James Webb Space Telescope, are revealing truly gigantic black holes that appeared in the relatively young universe. Just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, it would appear our cosmos was already home to black holes billions of times more massive than the sun. The only known way to create black holes is through the deaths of massive stars, but that…

We’ve all woken up in a terrible mood from time to time, but a newly observed monster black hole is really having a bad day. The previously inactive supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy SDSS1335+0728, located about 300 million light-years away from us, was seen erupting with the longest and most powerful X-ray blasts ever seen from such a cosmic titan. This active phase marks the start of the supermassive black hole devouring matter around it and erupting with short-lived flaring events called quasiperiodic eruptions (QPEs). The…

Using 16 years of data from NASA’s gamma-ray detecting Fermi spacecraft, astronomers have discovered that “microquasars,” systems in which a black hole is slowly devouring a star, may be small, but they pack one heck of a punch. Despite their diminutive nature, this research suggests even microquasars snacking on small stars can have an impressive cosmic influence, becoming powerful natural particle accelerators. This means black holes indulging in stellar meals of all sizes could be responsible for a higher-than-suspected amount of high-energy charged particles called “cosmic rays,” which are constantly…

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of hidden supermassive black holes lurking in the universe — and there may be billions or even trillions more out there that we still haven’t found. The researchers identified these giant black holes by peering through clouds of dust and gas in infrared light. The finds could help astronomers refine their theories of how galaxies evolve, the researchers say. Hunting for black holes is difficult work. They are the darkest objects in the universe, as not even light can escape their gravitational pull. Scientists can sometimes…

Anyone who has experienced the blistering pain associated with biting into a fresh apple pastry or taking a swig of hot coffee can attest to the importance of blowing on your food or drink before introducing it to your mouth. It turns out that black holes may perform the cosmic equivalent of this routine, “blowing” on blistering hot matter before they gobble it down. This supermassive black hole-food cooling process was discovered by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope and the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe some of the…

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered distant, overly massive supermassive black holes in the early universe. The black holes seem way too massive compared to the mass of the stars in the galaxies that host them. In the modern universe, for galaxies close to our own Milky Way, supermassive black holes tend to have masses equal to around 0.01% of the stellar mass of their host galaxy. Thus, for every 10,000 solar masses attributed to stars in a galaxy, there is around one solar mass of…