Scientists discover black holes spinning unexpectedly fast: ‘You’re essentially looking at its fossil record’

Scientists have discovered that some supermassive black holes rotate much more rapidly than expected. The discovery came as the result of a new form of “black hole archeology” that links black hole spins to the gas and dust they have consumed to grow over 7 billion years of cosmic history. The findings, courtesy of the … Read more

The top 7 black hole discoveries from 2024

Our fascination with black holes is pretty understandable; their one-way boundary, the “event horizon,” traps light, meaning no signal can ever travel from inside a black hole to outside. The edge of the black hole is thus a region of space and time that expressly forbids interlopers. That’s a recipe for mystery. And we all … Read more

Want to find a black hole? Pick up a rock

This artist’s concept shows many tiny primordial black holes. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center While black holes are perplexing at any size, some of the most mysterious are hypothetical primordial black holes, those that sprung into existence in the first second after the Big Bang and some of which are featherweights on the black … Read more

‘Missing link’ black hole in the Milky Way’s densest star cluster is still missing

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

James Webb Space Telescope catches monster black hole napping after ‘overeating’ in the early universe

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

New Research may Explain how Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe Grew so Fast

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

Not all stars with black hole companions die gruesome deaths, scientists say

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

Sweeping gravitational wave map of the universe could reveal hidden black holes

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