Holes

The transition in star formation rates and black hole growth as redshift decreases from regimes where positive feedback dominates to a later epoch when feedback is largely negative. CreditSteven Burrows, Rosemary Wyse, and Mitch BegelmanThe James Webb Space Telescope’s discovery of early galaxies with massive black holes challenges traditional galaxy formation theories, proposing a synchronous development of black holes and stars, a finding that could reshape our understanding of cosmic evolution.Astronomers have long…

As anyone who's ever seen a science fiction movie knows, whipping up a black hole in a laboratory doesn't seem like such a good idea. But that didn't stop researchers in England who wanted to see if they could create something in the lab that would serve as a black hole analog and give them greater insights into the way spacetime curves near the galactic gravity gobblers.So researchers from the University of Nottingham (UN), King's College London, and Newcastle University turned to vortices in fluids, which can, in some…

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has potentially unlocked a crucial piece of the cosmic puzzle, shedding light on one of the universe's most enigmatic phenomena - black holes. Contrary to the spotlight typically reserved for the colossal supermassive black holes, a recent discovery suggests that their smaller counterparts, dubbed "baby quasars," might hold the key to unraveling long standing mysteries.Traditionally, supermassive black holes, with masses billions of times those of the sun, steal the cosmic limelight.…

A galaxy some 750 million light-years away has been discovered hosting the heftiest pair of supermassive black holes we've ever seen.The pair have a combined mass of a whopping 28 billion times the mass of the Sun. While there are certainly individual black holes that exceed that mass, the pair – lurking in a galaxy called B2 0402+379 – represent the chonkiest black hole binary we've found.And they exhibit several peculiar properties that are helping astronomers figure out what happens to this gargantua when they come…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain As misinformation and radicalization rise, it's tempting to look for something to blame: the internet, social media personalities, sensationalized political campaigns, religion, or conspiracy theories. And once we've settled on a cause, solutions usually follow: do more fact-checking, regulate advertising, ban YouTubers deemed to have "gone too far." …

RIT leads a NASA-funded research project to explore electromagnetic signals from supermassive black hole mergers, aiming to advance our understanding of galaxies’ formation and evolution through high-precision simulations. Credit: SciTechDaily.comManuela Campanelli to lead research team studying electromagnetic signals from merging supermassive black holes.Rochester Institute of Technology scientists will be the lead researchers on a $1.8 million NASA grant to study electromagnetic signals from merging supermassive black…

An illustration of a magnetic field generated by a supermassive black hole in the early universe, showing turbulent plasma outflows that help turn nearby gas clouds into stars. New findings suggest this process might be responsible for accelerated star formation in the first 50 million years of the universe. Credit: Roberto Molar Candanosa/Johns Hopkins University Which came first: Black holes or galaxies? Findings ‘completely shake up’ what we know about galaxy formation.Black holes not only existed at the dawn of time,…

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Artist’s concept of a black hole. This representation includes a disk of overheated material that is being pulled by the gravitational field, and also the jets of material being spewed perpendicularly to the disk. These jets shine brightly in radio frequencies, a signal the authors of this study are able to predict from the automatic analysis of astronomical images using machine learning techniques. Credit: S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF)Upcoming radio telescope sky surveys are set to observe millions of early Universe…

A recently published study in The Astrophysical Journal details 18 new black holes discovered eating away at nearby stars. The black holes were found when astronomers noticed new tidal disruption events (TDEs), which are extreme instances where a star is tidally drawn into a black hole.The stars are ripped into shreds and slowly eaten by the black hole, creating an enormous burst of energy that can be seen all across the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s these TDEs that scientists look for when they are trying to…