Black holes are remarkable astronomical objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them. The most gigantic ones, known as "supermassive" black holes, can weigh millions to billions times the mass of the sun.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have witnessed the dramatic dance between a supermassive black hole-powered quasar and merging galaxies less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
Most known black holes are either extremely massive, like the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies, or relatively lightweight, with a mass of under 100 times that of the Sun. Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs…
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have witnessed the dramatic dance between a supermassive black hole-powered quasar and merging galaxies less than a billion years after the Big Bang.
New research suggests that galaxies with quasars at their active hearts are seven times more likely to harbor elusive supermassive black hole binary paintings than other galaxies.
The James Webb Space Telescope found "tiny red dots" in the early universe representing overgrown supermassive black holes and stars that are impossibly old for the infant cosmos.
In the beginning, the Universe was all primordial gas. Somehow, some of it was swept up into supermassive black holes (SMBHs), the gargantuan singularities that reside at the heart of galaxies. The details of how that happened and how…
A team of astrophysicists led by Caltech has managed for the first time to simulate the journey of primordial gas dating from the early universe to the stage at which it becomes swept up in a disk of material fueling a single supermassive…
The James Webb Space Telescope found "tiny red dots" in the early universe representing overgrown supermassive black holes and stars that are impossibly old for the infant cosmos.
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...
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…
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.
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…