All current and planned gravitational wave observatories are located in the northern hemisphere, in the US, India, Europe, and Japan. Even the next-generation observatories like Cosmic Explorer 40-km and the Einstein Telescope will be in the north. But a telescope in the southern hemisphere would provide a much larger baseline, allowing the detection of fainter gravitational waves. A new paper makes the case for building an observatory south of the equator.

Thanks to data obtained by Webb, astronomers have confirmed that MACS0647-star-1 is the second farthest star observed to date.

Actively feeding supermassive black holes are known as quasars, and they can outshine all the stars of their host galaxy. Part of their brightness comes from the accretion disk surrounding the black hole, but they're hard to image directly because quasars are so far away. New data from one of the world's largest telescopes has managed this feat, detecting near-infrared emission lines that mark significant regions in the accretion disk in a quasar.

Astronomers have found supermassive black holes in the centers of most galaxies. To get the black holes we see today, they must have been feeding in the past, packing on the mass to grow so big. But, a recent survey with JWST failed to turn up as many active galactic nuclei as astronomers expected. This just deepens the mystery. How did mature galaxies like the Milky Way get their black holes if they didn't go through this feeding period?

After over a decade of observations of pulsars, astronomers could finally tease out the gravitational wave background of the Universe, the combined signal from merging supermassive black holes. But it was just the general presence of mergers, not specific events. A new paper proposes that the same pulsars could next be used to detect the gravitational waves from individual merging supermassive black holes. The more nearby pulsars astronomers can find, the more accurate their measurements will become.

A pair of X-ray telescopes have observed the messy aftermath of a star that came too close to a supermassive black hole 290 million light-years away. It's believed that the star had three times the mass of the Sun, so this was one of the largest tidal disruption events ever seen. Although the black hole consumed some of the star, most of its guts were thrown into the surrounding space, polluting the region with the chemicals that allowed astronomers to estimate its stellar mass.

Using the ESO's VLT, an international team of observers was able to study Neptune's Great Dark Spot with a ground-based telescope for the first time.