The early Universe is a puzzling and—in many ways—still-unknown place. The first billion years of cosmic history saw the explosive creation of stars and the growth of the first galaxies. It’s also a time when the earliest known black holes…
Researchers have developed a new way to probe supermassive black holes and their evolution across the universe. Scientists at MIT, NASA, and elsewhere have developed...
After 20 years watching stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud for hints of a phenomenon predicted by Einstein, scientists throw doubt on the connection between ancient black holes and dark matter.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered an improbably huge black hole near the dawn of time, which doesn't seem to be eating near as much as it should.
A gargantuan "exhaust vent" may be channeling hot gas away from the Milky Way's supermassive black hole at millions of miles per hour — and filling up two enormous bubbles that tower over the galaxy.
A supermassive black hole in the heart of a galaxy is the ultimate 800-pound gorilla of astrophysics. Not only do the most active ones suck in material and hide it away, but their accretion disks also blast strong quasar winds out to space…
Game development studio and intergalactic war ministry Arrowhead have launched a new series of written update posts for players of Helldivers 2 to help keep the war record straight. Mostly, this is the usual case of somebody on the team…
A physicist investigating black holes has found that, in an expanding universe, Einstein's equations require that the rate of the universe's expansion at the event horizon of every black hole must be a constant, the same for all black…
New studies suggest the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could detect primordial black holes from the early universe, potentially confirming their role in cosmic inflation...
The quest to understand dark matter has taken many twists and turns. It’s a scientific tale but also a human one. We know there’s a missing mass problem, but astrophysicists and cosmologists can’t figure out what the missing matter is. One…
The James Webb Space Telescope saw a supermassive black hole that wasn't overfeeding when time began, deepening the mystery of how black hole grew so massive so quickly.
NASA deepens investigation of J1120+0641 as an inexplicably massive black hole refutes previous explanations of cosmic dawn. Find out more about it in this article.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has observed a galaxy in an early stage of the universe. The light from the galaxy, J1120+0641, has taken nearly as long to reach Earth as the universe's age. Independent measurements have revealed a…
First looks would tell most observers that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and very young stars have nothing in common. But that’s not true. Astronomers have detected a supermassive black hole (SMBH) whose growth is regulated the same way…
Astronomers have measured supermassive black hole winds that existed when the universe was less than a billion years old, showing how these cosmic titans shape galaxies.
Scientists cannot explain how a giant supermassive black hole with the mass of one billion of our suns existed so soon after the birth of the universe.