Supermassive black holes usually lurk unseen, but when an unlucky star drifts too close they ignite titanic outbursts brighter than 100 supernovae. By mixing NASA, ESA, and ground-based data, astronomers caught three of these rare “extreme…
One of the most perplexing discoveries in modern astronomy has been finding supermassive black holes, some weighing billions of times more than our sun, in galaxies that formed less than 750 million years after the Big Bang. They appear to…
Hubble spotted a rare off-center black hole shredding a star, revealing the first optical discovery of a wandering supermassive black hole. Astronomers using NASA telescopes have made a dramatic discovery that sounds like something from a…
An unfolding mystery is how early supermassive black holes got so big, so early. Their high mass is tough to explain through a ladder of mergers; instead, astronomers suggest they could have formed directly from huge clouds of gas. In a…