black holes

For the first time, astronomers think they’ve spotted two pairs of merging dwarf galaxies, with each pair sporting a duo of soon-to-collide black holes. The observations could reveal new details about the early formation of large galaxies like our own Milky Way, as well as the supermassive black holes that lurk at their centers. Despite their relatively small size, dwarf galaxies pack a hefty scientific punch. Thought to be the most abundant galaxy type during the first several hundred million years after the big bang,…

In the popular imagination, black holes are voracious monstrosities gulping down anything in their vicinity. That is why there are occasional worries that physicists might accidentally or intentionally create one, perhaps inside a particle accelerator such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva. Would such a dark behemoth swallow up Earth itself? Not quite. No one has ever created a black hole on our planet before. But even if someone did, it likely wouldn’t pose a huge threat. Real-world black holes are…

When stars are born, their core contracts as they pack in mass. And when stars die, their core shrinks again as they burn off their fuel and begin to collapse into a white dwarf, a neutron star or even a black hole in a supernova explosion. In both cases, the diminishing core starts spinning faster, much like an ice skater does when pulling in their arms. But observations of stars have revealed something odd: these shrinking stellar cores don’t speed up nearly as much as they should. For example, in a red giants—the kind…

Cosmologists have spent decades striving to understand why our universe is so stunningly vanilla. Not only is it smooth and flat as far as we can see, but it’s also expanding at an ever-so-slowly increasing pace, when naive calculations suggest that—coming out of the Big Bang—space should have become crumpled up by gravity and blasted apart by repulsive dark energy.To explain the cosmos’s flatness, physicists have added a dramatic opening chapter to cosmic history: They propose that space rapidly inflated like a balloon…

Black holes are the biggest mysteries in Space and yes, they are most savage phenomena in outer space. Now, they have been caught ravaging the same stars over and over again. The ESA XMM-Newton space telescope has provided two different teams of Astronomers a deep look at repeated outbursts of light from inactive black holes that are attacking the same stars again and again. This discovery is as unexpected as it is shocking as the outbursts from these black holes appear only when a black hole ravages a star. The…

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory Telescope, astronomers have found out hundreds of previously hidden, or buried black holes. Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory Telescope, astronomers have found out hundreds of previously hidden, or buried black holes. This discovery is going to help astronomers provide a more accurate census of black holes in the universe.The black holes in this new study are the supermassive variety that contain millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers think that…

Illustration: Carl Knox – OzGrav, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, Swinburne University of TechnologyOn February 11, astronomers saw a distant flash of light that seemed to come from a source as bright as a quadrillion suns. They alerted other scientists to the event, and several telescopes quickly pivoted to focus on the flash. Now, two teams of researchers have identified its source: a black hole feasting in the distant universe.Black holes are famously dark; their gravitational pull is so…

Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) launched last December as a collaboration between the U.S. space agency NASA and the Italian Space Agency. Most galaxies are built around humongous black holes. While many of these are comparatively docile, like the one at our Milky Way's center, some are fierce - guzzling surrounding material and unleashing huge and blazingly bright jets of high-energy particles far into space.Using data from the recently deployed Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) orbiting observatory,…

Researchers' recent observations of a black hole called Cygnus X-1 reveal new details about the configuration of hot matter in the region . The first observations of a mass-accreting black hole from the Imaging X-Ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) mission reveal new details about the configuration of extremely hot matter in the region immediately surrounding it. Researchers are using measurements of the polarization of X-rays to test and refine models that describe how black holes swallow matter, becoming some of the…

Scientists have discovered a relatively small black hole lurking next to a star in the constellation Ophiuchus, about 1,600 light-years away. It’s now the closest-known back hole to Earth.Black holes are the densest objects in our universe (sorry, neutron stars). Whether they’re small, stellar-mass black holes or the supermassive ones atthe centers of galaxies, the objects have gravitational fields so intense that not even photons of light can escape their event horizons. The recently discovered black hole—named Gaia…