A colossal star met an unexpected fate when it drifted too close to a supermassive black hole 10 billion light-years away. Instead of exploding as a supernova, the star was torn apart, creating the brightest and most distant black hole…
Fresh observations of two merging black holes confirm predictions made by Stephen Hawking based on Albert Einstein’s theory. A decade after the first detection of gravitational waves from two merging black holes, the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA…
Scientists flew the XL-Calibur telescope on a high-altitude balloon to measure polarized X-rays from Cygnus X-1. These measurements reveal details about the chaotic, superheated material swirling around black holes. The team also captured…
Astronomers have discovered something remarkable — a supermassive black hole that is growing faster than expected. The black hole’s rapid growth defied what was previously known of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies.
An overnight update to Counter-Strike 2 erased billions of dollars in valuable digital assets that players had accumulated. The law gives them almost no recourse.
An international collaboration of physicists including researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has made measurements to better understand how matter falls into black holes and how enormous amounts of energy and light are released…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) are black holes theorized to have formed shortly after the Big Bang. Compared to black holes emerging from collapsing stars, PBHs could have very different masses, ranging from very small to extremely large.
Scientists using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have confirmed the presence of an actively growing supermassive black hole in a galaxy observed just 570 million years after the Big Bang. It's a greedy blackhole,…
Observations of a merging black hole further supports the Area Theorem of black hole thermodynamics, which states that the event horizon of a black hole produced by two merging black holes must have a surface area no less than the areas of…
An international collaboration of physicists has made measurements to better understand how matter falls into black holes and how enormous amounts of energy and light are released in the process.
Tracking down black holes at the center of dwarf galaxies has proven difficult. In part that is because they have a tendency to “wander” and are not located at the galaxy’s center. There are plenty of galaxies that might contain such a…
In 2023, scientists detected the gravitational waves from a black hole collision that seemed impossible. New research finally explains how this "forbidden" black hole came to be, and what it can teach us about these extreme objects.