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We usually think of black holes as cosmic destroyers, heartlessly devouring anything — even a star — that enters their enormous gravitational pull. But there might be another, more helpful side to supermassive black holes that we're only just discovering. More »
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These red dots represent some of the earliest galaxies known to astronomy. Located ten billion light-years away, they're only a few billion years older than the Big Bang. Their presence explains why we're now surrounded by massive elliptical galaxies. More »
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A couple weeks ago, astronomers spotted black holes that were ten billion times more massive than our Sun, setting new records for the biggest black holes ever found. NASA has spotted another record-setting black hole...although it's not quite as impressive. More »
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A massive gas cloud is on a collision course with the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. As this awesome artist's conception shows, it will be torn completely apart. This is our first chance to watch that happen. More »
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In the first billion years after the Big Bang, the universe was a smaller, emptier place, without the huge galaxies that dominate today. But there were already supermassive black holes that had grown shockingly huge by gorging themselves on gas. More »
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The universe simply doesn't operate on a human timescale. Events that are right about to happen in the cosmic sense could still be centuries away. But an extensive search discovered a star that really was right about to explode. More »
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Centaurus A is an active galaxy, meaning it gives off extraordinary amounts of radiation, most likely the result of a supermassive black hole. Somewhere inside these gas clouds and dust lanes, that black hole is creating unimaginable cosmic chaos. More »
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Many galaxies have gigantic black holes located at their center, but we're not usually able to actually see just how gigantic they are. Supermassive black holes are shrouded in huge dust clouds...which might be essential for the development of life. More »
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Some star clusters have no business surviving. For instance, there's a tiny cluster right next to our galaxy's supermassive black hole, which should be ripped apart by its intense gravity. But there's more to this cluster than meets the eye. More »
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Black holes "flare" when they release gigantic jets of material into space. While we've learned much about these jets and the accretion disks that feed black holes, we still know little about the ultra-bright, incredibly energetic bases of these jets. More »
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We didn't yet have the technology to notice, but Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, threw one hell of a tantrum a few hundred years ago. It's the only explanation for mysterious x-ray anomalies. More »
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Back in late March, NASA's Swift satellite detected a strange and unusual energy explosion in the constellation Draco. NASA now knows what it was: "the awakening of a distant galaxy's dormant black hole as it shredded and consumed a star." More »
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A distant, hyper-energetic black hole known as a quasar contains the largest reserve of water in the known universe, equivalent to 140 trillion times the water on Earth. The solution to our water crisis is only 12 billion light-years away! More »
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About two billion light-years from Earth, there's a huge jet of matter emanating from the core of galaxy 3C303. The jet carries a current of 10^18 amps, making it by far the highest electric current ever seen. More »
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The galaxy in this picture is Centaurus A, but it's being upstaged in its own cosmic neighborhood. Its central black hole is emitting jets that are a million light-years long...and this is our best look yet at this mysterious phenomenon. More »
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White holes are the opposite of black holes, objects into which nothing can enter but are constantly spewing out matter. They were thought to be completely hypothetical, more a mathematical oddity than a real thing...but we may have seen one. More »
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Some black holes may be so ancient that they predate the stars themselves, forming instead in the chaotic first moments after the Big Bang. There might even be some black holes out there from the universe before the Big Bang. More »
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This strange purple plume that dwarfs the Moon is what we'd see if our eyes could perceive radio waves. These jets, over a million light-years long, are spewing from the massive black hole in the Centaurus A galaxy. More »
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Black holes have a well-deserved reputation for being cosmic destroyers, ripping apart anything that comes into contact with their intense gravitational forces. But a radical new theory says advanced intelligent life could live on planets inside black holes. More »
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Right now, three major telescopes are focused on a huge, sustained burst of energy coming from the center of a galaxy 3.8 billion light years away. Astronomers are speculating on what it could be. More »
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This black hole is five times the mass of our Sun, and it's getting bigger all the time, thanks to a normal star that has the colossally bad luck of being the black hole's partner in a binary star system. More »
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We recently discovered that gigantic gamma ray bubbles were balanced above and below the center of the Milky Way, stretching out 25,000 light-years in each direction. And now we might finally know where these mysterious bubbles come from. More »
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The galaxy Markarian 231 is dying, and its own supermassive black hole is ripping it apart. The black hole is absorbing so much material and spewing so much dust and gas back out that star formation has been completely disrupted. More »
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The supermassive black hole at the heart of the neighboring galaxy M87 has the mass of 6.6 billion suns. It's the biggest black hole to be precisely measured, and it's us our best shot at really seeing these strange objects. More »
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Back in 2007, Dutch schoolteacher and amateur astronomer Hanny van Arkel spotted a strange object near a distant spiral galaxy...and nobody had any idea what it was. Now, four years later, we're finally learning the truth about this mysterious object More »
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Centuries before black holes became accepted science, a fat little man in 1780s Yorkshire imagined stars so massive that even light could not escape. He predicted black holes. This is the incredible story of John Michell and his "dark stars." More »
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In Charles Burns' comic Black Hole, a mysterious STD transforms teenagers into deformed aberrations. Filmmaker Rupert Sanders has filmed a live-action version of one of the graphics novel's scenes, replete with stoned mutants and naked dog ladies. More »
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When a giant star dies, it can collapse into a black hole or implode into an ultra-dense neutron star. But there are even stranger possibilities. Here are some theorized stars that make black holes look downright boring. More »
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We recently had the chance to talk with Tron Legacy director Joe Kosinski. Kosinski, who originally trained as an architect at Columbia, told us about constructing the brand new Tron City and updating the Tron aesthetic for the 21st century. More »
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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has picked up what appears to be the youngest black hole we've discovered near our planet. This object could however instead be the youngest documented neutron star. Either way, it's an exciting find. More »
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Gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful (and mysterious) explosions in the universe, shooting massive concentrated jets of hot plasma that are way too powerful to come from an ordinary supernova. And they might be the birth pangs of black holes. More »
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The universe is thought to have consistently become cooler over time. But about 1.5 billion years ago, the cosmos overheated in a massive temperature spike, caused by runaway black holes that pumped tons of ultraviolet radiation into the universe. More »
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White holes, which are basically reversed black holes, may not even exist in our universe, but you can create a perfect substitute for them in your kitchen. Water flowing from a tap obeys exactly the same laws as white holes. More »
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Cosmic strings are theoretical fault lines in the universe, defective links between different regions of space created in the moments after the Big Bang. And they might be theoretical no longer - distant quasars show the fingerprints of these strings. More »
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Long before he was named Best Fan Writer — way back in 1978, in fact — Frederik Pohl won another Hugo (and a Nebula too), for his novel Gateway. And yikes, what a book. More »
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Yes, we've managed to create a black hole...or at least the optical equivalent of a black hole's extreme, light-trapping properties thanks to an ingenious combination of lasers and glass. Best of all, it offers proof of Stephen Hawking's famous radiation. More »
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Black holes might be infinitely weirder than simply ultra-dense masses from which even light can't escape - they might actually be the end result of the collapse of five-dimensional objects known as black strings. Yeah...this one's going to get weird. More »
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Comic books can be a difficult to get into, what with their years of serial storytelling and convoluted continuity. Luckily, there are plenty of one-and-done graphic novels out there. Here are some of the best four-color gateway drugs. More »
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The gigantic black hole at the center of the huge M87 galaxy is doing its best impression of an Icelandic volcano, ejecting waves of particles that are disrupting star-creating gas just like bursts of volcanic gas can affect atmospheric ash. More »
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A star went supernova with more than twice the mass needed to ultimately collapse into a black hole. But something weirder happened - the star became a magnetar, an asteroid-sized star with the most powerful magnetic field in the universe. More »
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