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Tomorrow, astronomers and physicists from around the word will convene in Tucson, Arizona to discuss the Event Horizon Telescope Project — a global network of 50 radio telescopes that together could soon enable us to photograph the black hole at the center of our galaxy. More »
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What's 10-billion times as massive as our Sun, several times larger than our solar system, and has a gravitational influence on pretty much anything that comes within 2000 light years of its gaping, cosmic maw? Why, that would be a recently discovered black hole at the center of elliptical galaxy NGC 3842, the smaller — yes, smaller — of two supermassive black holes that astronomers have announced are the most massive they've ever discovered. More »
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It's cannibalism...in space! You're looking at an image of two recently discovered, absolutely colossal black holes currently battling it out at the heart of a galaxy named NGC3393. Well, "battling" may not be the right word — because one of them is eating the other. More »
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The centers of black holes are among the strangest places in the universe — so strange that current physics can't even describe them. Could these singularities be found out in the open? In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we find out. More »
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Most astronomers agree that at the center of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole. But how did these gravitational monsters form? Now it seems that they may have been here since the beginning of time. More »
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Here are three unsettling facts: Every galaxy has a black hole at its center; the black hole is spinning; and the black hole's spin is speeding up. More »
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Scientists have come up with a new theory about how ultra-light black holes could be formed, and it's an entirely new way of looking at the phenomenon. Some black holes might be formed from the outside in, not the inside out. More »
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Behold that shining blue light at the center of this evil eye in space — long named the Eye of Sauron for its resemblance to the malevolent gaze from the Lord of the Rings saga. More »
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In a very special,"Ask a Physicist," we'll hear the true story of doomed romance of particles and anti-particles as they attempt to defy the undeniable attraction of black holes. It's a story of betrayal, quantum fluctuations, and eventual evaporation. More »
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Four hundred and thirty million light-years from earth a ring of black holes is forming, possibly around some very nervous aliens. In the constellation Cetus lies ARP 147, the remains of a spiral galaxy and an elliptical galaxy that . . . interacted. More »
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We've never seen it happen, but a collision with two black holes would be one of the most dramatic events in the entire universe, releasing so much energy that we could detect it clear across the cosmos. 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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There are two types of black holes: small ones that form from the remnants of collapsed stars, and their supermassive counterparts at the center of galaxies. But astronomers believe there's a third, intermediate-sized type that we haven't found yet...until now. More »
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We just snapped our best photo yet of dark matter, but we still don't know just what it is. Now we might have a way to (literally) shed some light on dark matter...with an assist from super-massive black holes. More »
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A leading candidate for room temperature superconductors is the copper compound cuprate, but no one knew how cuprates facilitated superconductivity...until some brave souls looked inside a black hole and broke out the string theory to explain how they work. More »
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In this week's "Ask a Physicist," we tackle a general relativistic paradox: If time slows down near the event horizon of a black hole, how does anything ever fall in? More »
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Active galactic nuclei, found at the center of some galaxies, are the brightest objects in the universe. But their origins remain mysterious. Now we know the poetic truth: They come from the cosmic rain from giant gas clouds. More »
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A black hole only slightly heavier than our Sun is emitting the most powerful jets of energy ever seen, rivaling that of quasars a million times larger, and creating a bubble of hot gas and fast-moving particles 1000 light-years across. More »
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Astronomers have discovered that the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy is so weak that it's nearly inexplicable. So is the Milky Way's black hole. But lately the Andromeda black hole, M31, has been exploding with energy. More »
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There are any number of jokes to be made here. All of them are inappropriate. Suffice it to say that white holes are a possible product of black holes, and they might show us what other universes look like. More »
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This may look like a new promo pic from Tron Legacy, but it's actually the winning image in Princeton University's "Art of Science" competition. Physics doesn't just explain the most awesome phenomena in the universe — it also creates art. More »
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Can a single galaxy support two mid-sized black holes? This one does. This composite image shows the starburst galaxy M82, with two intermediate-sized "survivor" black holes that have managed to avoid falling into the galactic core. More »
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There are some theories, and yes, they are all disturbing. More »
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Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered the most distant black hole ever observed. Six million light years from Earth, it lies at the heart of a spiral galaxy, and is rapidly orbiting and eating a massive star. More »
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According to researchers at Australian National University, the end of the universe will happen earlier than anyone previously thought. The mother of all deadlines is coming up! More »
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Look at this new picture of Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of our galaxy: It's alive with starlight. Sagittarius A eats much less stellar matter than a normal black hole, and this image provides a clue why. More »
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Black holes aren't just cosmic destroyers or grim reminders of the final fate that awaits massive stars. They may have once had a more constructive purpose. New models suggest they were essential in the formation of the early universe. More »
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A star, no bigger than our own sun, orbits a black hole, and every once in a while they get so close, the black hole starts siphoning off pieces of the star — creating an explosive particle blast. More »
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Researchers are on the lookout for a new type of star, one composed of matter that behaves differently from the kind we're familiar with. If these stars exist, they could solve one of the biggest mysteries astrophysicists have confronted. More »
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Could a super-advanced civilization live inside the acretion disk, the super-dense area around the black hole at the center of a galaxy? Author Mike Brotherton has played with this idea, and a couple of scientific papers say it's possible. More »
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Artificially generated black holes could provide us with the power to make inter-solar travel a possibility. New research shows how strapping a black hole to your starship might just give you the juice to get to Alpha Centauri. More »
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The meeting of two black holes in the galaxy NGC 6240 started 30 million years ago, but the ending was known from the beginning: in the end, there can only be one super-massive black hole. [Chandra Observatory] More »
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The center of our galaxy shines in greater detail than ever before, in this new composite image from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory. (Click to enlarge.) The whole gamut of stellar evolution is here, from bright young stars to black holes. More »
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Astronomers have discovered a black hole unlike any other previously discovered. Neither big enough to be a supermassive black hole, nor small enough to be the remnants of a collapsed star, its "average" size is a cosmic mystery. More »
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Eventually a galaxy has to grow up and settle down, and stop throwing superheated gas around all over the place. And now astrophysicists have figured out how the glowing "superblobs" around galaxies help to make this happen. More »
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Black holes are mysterious cosmic structures partly because they radiate in regions of the spectrum invisible to the human eye. But artists still strive to depict their violent, intense lives. We've got a gallery. More »
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Scientists who mapped a donut-shaped region of the sky (pictured) with a balloon-borne telescope called ARCADE say they've picked up an unmistakable radio signal coming from beyond our Milky Way galaxy. Sorry, but it's probably not E.T. broadcasting. One theory is that ARCADE detected faint radiation left over from the universe's first mega-stars, which all collapsed during the first billion years of time as we know it. The energy transmitted by their long-ago supernovae might be reaching us in the form of these transmissions. Or it might be caused by ultra-massive black holes in other galaxies. Get the full story over at New Scientist. More »
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Omega Centauri is one of the biggest star clusters orbiting our own galaxy, with the light of millions of stars blazing from it — including some visible with the naked eye. But those stars aren't all the same age, as this new image from the Spitzer Space Telescope shows. Combining visible and infrared images, this new composite shows a mixture of ancient stars (which are red) and younger stars, like our own sun (which are blue). And click through for new evidence that all those stars may be circling a massive black hole at Omega Centauri's core. More »
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