Black Holes

At Cosmic Noon, this Black Hole Was the Life of the Party

By Mark Thompson - June 11, 2025

About 3 billion years after the Big Bang, star formation exploded across the cosmos. During the era dubbed "cosmic noon.” It was also when galaxies and supermassive black holes were growing faster than at any other time in the history of the universe. Now astronomers have discovered a monster from this frenzied period: a supermassive black hole unleashing jets that stretch over 300,000 light-years into space, revealing the sheer violence of its feeding frenzy.

New Measurements for M87's Supermassive Black Hole: Spin and Accretion Rate

By Mark Thompson - June 06, 2025

The monster black hole lurking at the center of galaxy M87 is an absolute beast. It is one of the largest in our vicinity and was the ideal first target for the Event Horizon Telescope. Scientists have taken a fresh look at the supermassive black hole using those iconic Event Horizon Telescope images and have now figured out just how fast this monster is spinning and how much material it's devouring.

A Terrifying Simulation of a Black Hole Gobbling Up a Neutron Stars

By Mark Thompson - June 05, 2025

Across the universe, dramatic events occur when a black hole meets a neutron star. A neutron star is the ultra-dense remains of a massive star that exploded — imagine all the mass of our Sun compressed into a sphere just a few tens of kilometres wide. When a black hole and neutron star spiral toward each other, the result is one of nature's most violent spectacles.

The Event Horizon Telescope's Next Feat? Multi-Color Pictures of Black Holes

By Brian Koberlein - May 24, 2025

Astronomers with the Event Horizon Telescope have developed a new way to observe the radio sky at multiple frequencies, and it means we will soon be able to capture color images of supermassive black holes.

A Black Hole is Firing Bullet-Like Blobs of Gas into Space

By Mark Thompson - May 16, 2025

Scientists have discovered that black holes don't just devour everything—they also fire back. While nothing can escape the event horizon, black holes generate ferocious winds that blast outward at significant fractions of the speed of light. New research challenges the long-held belief that they flow smoothly and continuously. Instead, these winds are violent, fragmented bursts resembling rapid-fire streams of gas bullets. Astronomers have now witnessed this phenomenon firsthand, detecting five distinct gas components travelling 20-30% the speed of light and erupting like geysers from the black hole's vicinity.

Everything in the Universe Could Decay from Hawking Radiation

By Mark Thompson - May 13, 2025

You've probably heard that black holes stick around for a long time—but even they are not eternal. Over unimaginable spans of time, they slowly evaporate into space through a process called Hawking radiation. And here's the kicker: this doesn't just apply to black holes. Anything with mass—stars, moons, even you—can, in theory, evaporate in this way. Black holes are a special case since they don't have a surface and can actually swallow some of their own radiation, making their demise painfully slow. The biggest ones might take up to 10^100 years to disappear. But smaller objects? Something like the Moon—or a human being—could fade into nothingness in "just" 10^90 years.

This Supermassive Black Hole Chases its Food

By Evan Gough - May 08, 2025

Supermassive Black Holes reside at the center of large galaxies, where they dominate their surroundings and sometimes eat stars. When they gobble up a star, they emit a distinctive light flare. This makes it easier for astronomers to pinpoint their location. Astronomers have detected one of these flares offset from a galactic center. Is the black hole shifting its location?

JWST May Have Found a Supermassive Black Hole in the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy

By Evan Gough - April 30, 2025

We know that our Milky Way galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in its center. Astronomers think most spiral galaxies do, and that SMBHs coexist and co-evolve with their host galaxies. However, they haven't been able to find them in all spirals. M83, the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, has always been puzzling because scientists haven't seen any evidence of an SMBH in its center. The JWST may have finally found some.

Even Stellar Black Holes Shape Their Galaxies

By Evan Gough - April 28, 2025

It's nearly impossible to overstate the effect supermassive black holes have on their host galaxies. When actively accreting matter, they release colossal amounts of energy as winds, jets, and radiation that shape their surroundings. But stellar mass black holes also shape their surroundings with energetic jets.

Astronomers Watch a Black Hole Wake Up in Real Time

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - April 19, 2025

You never know when a central supermassive black hole is going to power up and start gobbling matter. Contrary to the popular view that these monsters are constantly devouring nearby stars and gas clouds, it turns out they spend part of their existence dormant and inactive. New observations from the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft opened a window on the "turn on event" for one of these monsters in a distant galaxy.

How Black Holes Can Emit Powerful Jets

By Brian Koberlein - April 14, 2025

We've long known that black holes can produce powerful jets of ionized gas. These jets stream away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. Jets produced by supermassive black holes are so powerful they are seen as quasars from billions of light-years away. But when you think about it, jets are a bit counterintuitive. Black holes trap and consume material through their tremendous gravity, so how can they push streams of material away? A recent study in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan shows how it works.

This Star Might Have Been Thrown Out of a Globular Cluster by an Intermediate Mass Black Hole

By Mark Thompson - April 09, 2025

Astronomers are on the hunt for those in-between black holes, not the small stellar ones or the supermassive ones, but something right in the middle. Recently, a group of scientists spotted a star travelling at high velocity out of the globular cluster M15. This speedy star got kicked out about 20 million years ago and is now zooming along at an incredible 550 km/s, fast enough that it's actually escaping our entire Galaxy! The researchers think this stellar ejection might have happened because of some cosmic game of pool - basically a three-body interaction involving one of those middle-sized black holes they've been trying to find!

Supermassive Black Holes Could Strip Stars Down to their Helium Cores

By Brian Koberlein - April 08, 2025

We all know that black holes can devour stars. Rip them apart and consume their remnants. But that only happens if a star passes too close to a black hole. What if a star gets close enough to a star to experience strong tidal effects, but not close enough to be immediately devoured? This scenario is considered in a recent paper on the arXiv.

Andromeda's Black Hole is Winking at Us

By Mark Thompson - April 07, 2025

Despite their name, black holes can sometimes emit radiation. A team of astronomers has recently detected a flicker of X-ray radiation from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Andromeda Galaxy. This flicker was identified using 15 years of data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, revealing two distinct flashes in 2006 and 2013. Interestingly, these flashes coincided with bursts of neutrinos detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, offering exciting new insights into the extreme conditions surrounding the black hole.

A New Technique to Find Hidden Black Holes

By Evan Gough - April 03, 2025

To the uninitiated, astronomers' interest in ancient black holes might seem like an obsession. Why spend so much time, energy, and resources looking back billions of years just to detect the nearly undetectable? They do it because ancient black holes hold unique clues to understanding the modern Universe.

Ultralight Dark Matter Could Explain Early Black Hole Formation

By Mark Thompson - April 02, 2025

Blackholes are a fascinating class of object to study. We have learned significant amounts over the years but one of the outstanding mysteries remains; how there were supermassive black holes with millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun present in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Our current models of stellar mass black hole evolution and mergers cannot explain their existence. A new paper suggests that ultralight dark matter particles, like axions may have done the trick and provides a mass range for expected particles.

Black Hole Found Consuming its Own History

By Brian Koberlein - April 01, 2025

One of the common misconceptions about black holes is that they devour not only matter, but also the history of that matter. So when a black hole forms, you can only guess how it came to be. That isn't entirely true. Informational history is only lost when matter crosses the event horizon, and perhaps not even then. The material surrounding a black hole still has a rich history. In a recent study, astronomers have used that history to uncover the origins of a black hole system.

New Insights Into Little Red Dots. An Early Phase of Black Hole Growth

By Brian Koberlein - March 25, 2025

The James Webb Space Telescope has given us a view of the earliest moments of galaxy formation in the Universe. It's also revealed a few surprises. One of these is the appearance of small, highly redshifted objects nicknamed "little red dots (LRDs)." We aren't entirely sure what they are, but a new study points to an answer.

How an Actively Feeding Supermassive Black Hole Could Be Good for Life

By Carolyn Collins Petersen - March 24, 2025

When it comes to safe places for life, supermassive black holes are probably the last place you'd consider safe for nearby planets, let alone life-bearing ones. There are good reasons for this: those monsters at the hearts of galaxies suck down everything that comes into contact with them. When they do that, they blast out killer radiation. Neither activity is necessarily good for life. Or is it? As it turns out, radiation from these active galactic nuclei (AGN) can nurture life under the right circumstances.

The Star Grinder: A Cloud of Black Holes at the Center of the Milky Way

By Brian Koberlein - March 23, 2025

There is a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. There is also a lot of other stuff there as well. Young stars, gas, dust, and stellar-mass black holes. It's a happening place. It is also surrounded by a veil of interstellar gas and dust, which means we can't observe the region in visible light. We can observe stars in the region through infrared and radio, and some of the gas there emits radio light, but the stellar-mass black holes remain mostly a mystery.

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