New research may have delivered bad news for scientists who thought they had discovered a “missing link” black hole in a dense Milky Way star cluster. The new findings imply that, rather than a rare intermediate-mass black hole, there is a cluster of stellar-mass black holes in Omega Centauri, believed to be the remains of … Read more
Napping after overfeeding on food is a dilemma many of us will be fortunate to face on Christmas Day. New research has shown that, billions of years ago, some early black holes also had to nap after overindulging. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers spotted a dormant supermassive black hole that existed just … Read more
Not long ago, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peered into Cosmic Dawn, the cosmological period when the first galaxies formed less than one billion years after the Big Bang. In the process, it discovered something rather surprising. Not only were there more galaxies (and brighter ones, too!) than expected, but these galaxies had supermassive … Read more
Death by black hole isn’t always inevitable for stars that exist in binary systems with one of these cosmic titans. There may be a way for small stars in such systems to dodge their expected fates: violent supernovas that end in the creation of another black hole. This expected mechanism is also believed to turn … Read more
The most detailed map of the universe ever created using gravitational waves could reveal hidden black holes, merging supermassive black holes and even the large-scale structure of the cosmos. The study, conducted by a team led by astronomers from Swinburne University of Technology, also presented the largest-ever galactic-scale detector of gravitational waves, which are basically … Read more
NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) has helped astronomers better understand the shapes of structures essential to a black hole – specifically, the disk of material swirling around it, and the shifting plasma region called the corona. The stellar-mass black hole, part of the binary system Swift J1727.8-1613, was discovered in the summer of 2023 … Read more
Scientists believe that at the heart of all large galaxies lurk supermassive black holes, cosmic titans with masses equivalent to that of millions or even billions of suns. Yet some black holes exceed even these monstrous masses to become “ultramassive black holes.” The most massive black hole that we are currently aware of is Phoenix … Read more