Tag: Black Holes

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time ever, mapped the plasma “burps” of a feeding supermassive black hole-powered quasar that dwells relatively close to Earth.  While supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun are thought to dwell at the heart of all galaxies, not all of these cosmic titans power quasars. Some, like the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, are relatively quiet because they are not greedily feeding on matter around…

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Black holes are some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe, capable of deforming the fabric of space around them so violently that not even light can escape their gravitational grip. But it turns out, much of what scientists know about these mysterious objects could be wrong. According to new research, published in April in the journal Physical Review D, black holes could actually be entirely different celestial entities known as gravastars. “Gravastars are hypothetical astronomical objects that were introduced [in 2001] as alternatives to black holes,” study co-author…

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Scientists have confirmed, for the first time, that the very fabric of spacetime takes a “final plunge” at the edge of a black hole.  The observation of this plunging region around black holes was made by astrophysicists at Oxford University Physics, and helps validate a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 theory of gravity: general relativity.  The Oxford team made the discovery while focusing on regions surrounding stellar-mass black holes in binaries with companion stars located relatively close to Earth. The researchers utilized X-ray data collected from a range of…

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Black hole week reaches its conclusion today (May 10), and there’s no better way to mark the occasion than with some “eggs-traordinary” black hole science. Using gravitational wave measurements by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), based in the U.S., and the Virgo and KAGRA detectors, located in Italy and Japan, respectively, scientists have found that the orbits of some binary black holes could be egg-shaped and exhibit a curious wobble. This research is more than a mere curiosity (and an “eggs-cuse” to crack some bad egg-related puns). The discovery…

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NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could use the grisly death of stars ripped apart by black holes to hunt the universe’s first population of stellar bodies. These early stars, referred to (somewhat confusingly) as Population III (Pop III) stars, were very different from the sun and other stars seen in the cosmos today. That’s because the universe wasn’t yet filled with “metals,” the term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.  Pop III stars arose just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang and…

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Black hole week is in full swing, and to celebrate, NASA has explained how its next major astronomical instrument, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will hunt for tiny black holes that date back to the Big Bang. When we think of black holes, we tend to picture vast cosmic monsters like stellar-mass black holes with masses tens to hundreds of times that of the sun. We may even picture supermassive black holes with masses millions (or even billions) of times that of the sun sitting at the hearts of…

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has observed light from stars surrounding some of the earlier supermassive black holes in the universe — black holes seen as they were less than a billion years after the Big Bang.  The observations conducted by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) addresses the question of how these cosmic titans that sit at the hearts of galaxies grew to tremendous masses, equivalent to millions (sometimes even billions) of suns. More specifically, how did they grow so rapidly? The findings could also…

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Scientists have used artificial intelligence to construct a three-dimensional model of an energetic outburst, or flare, that occurred around the Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). This 3D model could help scientists develop a clearer picture of the tumultuous environment that forms around supermassive black holes in general. The material swirling around Sgr A* exists in a flattened structure called an “accretion disk” that can periodically flare. These flares occur across a range of light wavelengths, all the way from high-energy X-rays to low-energy infrared light and…

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When it comes to primordial black holes being dark matter suspects, their alibi may be falling apart. Tiny black holes, created seconds after the birth of the universe, may survive longer than expected, reigniting a suspicion that primordial black holes could account for dark matter, the universe’s most mysterious stuff. Dark matter currently represents one of the most pressing problems in physics. That is because, despite making up an estimated 85% of the matter in the cosmos, dark matter remains effectively invisible to our eyes because it doesn’t interact with…

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A hiccuping supermassive black hole has alerted astronomers to a whole new type of black hole behavior.  In 2020, a previously quiet black hole at the heart of a galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth, and with a mass equivalent to 50 million suns, suddenly erupted, brightening the material around it by a factor of 1,000. A team of researchers thinks that these periodic eruptions are caused by a second, smaller black hole slamming into a disk of gas and dust, or “accretion disk,” surrounding the supermassive black hole, causing…

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