Astronomers working at the ESA's Integral Space Observatory have observed a planet about 14-to-30 times the mass of Jupiter stray just a little too close to a dormant black hole. The gas giant (or possibly a brown dwarf) managed to avoid complete annihilation, but the black hole was still able to chomp down on a good…

A new discovery could rewrite the history books on the Milky Way. According to a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, our galaxy absorbed a smaller satellite galaxy several million years ago. But more than that, it was a celestial event that culminated in the meeting of each…

The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover just how diverse all its planets, stars, nebulae and unexplained chunks of matter really are. So what is all this matter doing in our universe, other than just floating in space?

Pretty much anything could, in theory, become a black hole if it were squeezed down small enough. At what point would the Earth become a (very unimpressive) black hole in space? We're going to figure it out, and tell the tale of the Schwarzschild Radius.

For some unknown reason, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy shoots out an X-ray flare about once a day. These flares last a few hours with the brightness ranging from a few times to nearly one hundred times that of the black hole's regular output. But back in February 2012, astronomers using the…

This is really exciting news. On Friday, NASA announced that its Swift satellite had found evidence of a new black hole inside the Milky Way galaxy. The evidence? A newly formed X-Ray nova, what NASA's, Neil Gehrels calls a "once-a-mission event," near the center of our galaxy.

This animation, created with supercomputers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, show for the first time what happens to the magnetized gas clouds that surround supermassive black holes when two of them collide.

It took an array of four radio dishes positioned around the globe and an international team of astronomers to do it, but it was well worth the effort: Astronomers have measured the radius of a supermassive black hole in the M87 galaxy that is 50 million light years away and 6 billion times more massive than our sun.

In 2009, NASA launched its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) telescope, an Earth-orbiting infrared observatory designed to map the entire sky in unprecedented detail. WISE surveyed the sky for less than two years, but in that time collected vast quantities of information: It's been eighteen months since the…

Supermassive black holes, rare galaxies, oh my! Tomorrow afternoon, NASA will be hosting a teleconference to discuss new discoveries surrounding these and other extreme deep-space objects.