black holes

Powering future human civilizations in deep space will be no easy feat. But thanks to new research, there might be a highly efficient way to harness the highly energetic particles emanating from black holes to help...

An artist's impression of quasar J0313-1806. NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva Astronomers have discovered the earliest known supermassive black hole at the center of a bright, active galaxy called a quasar, 13 billion...

On the night of November 23, 2014, a powerful telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii was trying to pick out the enigmatic movements of a black hole travelling through space. In the seven hours the telescope peered at the...

Title: AGN Triality of Triple Mergers: Detection of Faint X-ray Point SourcesAuthors: Adi Foord, Kayhan Gultekin, Jessie C. Runnoe, Michael J. KossFirst Author’s Institution: University of Michigan, USAStatus:...

Yeah, you're gonna want to sit down for this one. It's a little a lot: It's possible that dark matter is made of tiny black holes created at the very beginning of time by nucleation from bubbles of false vacuum that...

Yeah, you're gonna want to sit down for this one. It's a little a lot: It's possible that dark matter is made of tiny black holes created at the very beginning of time by nucleation from bubbles of false vacuum that...

When the universe was a fledgling billion years old, a galaxy spewed a ginormous, fast-moving jet of radiation and plasma into the cosmos. Nearly 13 billion years later, that jet is visible to humans in the form of a...

Foreword:  One of the fun things about having written thousands (!!) of articles about astronomy over the past decade or two is going through old posts looking for relevant info. If I’m writing about a black hole,...

Foreword:  One of the fun things about having written thousands (!!) of articles about astronomy over the past decade or two is going through old posts looking for relevant info. If I’m writing about a black hole,...

Just time before Christmas to announce another paper in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was actually published a few days ago but because of holiday delays it took some time to get the metadata and DOI...

There is nothing black holes love more than star stuff, but one galaxy is spawning stars faster than the supermassive black hole lurking at its core can eat them. When black holes are feasting on stars, they turn into...

What we can see and touch are, in the scheme of the universe, relatively minor components, with visible matter and tangible mass constituting just 16 percent of the universe’s mass and 30 percent of its energy,...

Title: The Landscape of Galaxies Harboring Changing-Look Active Galactic Nuclei in the Local UniverseAuthors: Sierra A. Dodd, Jamie A.P. Law-Smith, Katie Auchettl, Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz, Ryan J. FoleyFirst Author’s...

Title: Chandra Observations of Abell 2261 Brightest Cluster Galaxy, a Candidate Host to a Recoiling Black HoleAuthors: K. Gültekin, S. Burke-Spolaor, T. R. Lauer, J. W. Lazio, L. A. Moustakas, P. Ogle, and M....

There are any number of ways to perish from our mortal plane that might have particularly unpleasant sensations and ramifications, but plummeting into the angry maw of a light-swallowing supermassive black hole would...

The event horizon of a black hole is a spherical or spheroidal region from which nothing, not even light, can escape. But outside the event horizon, the black hole is predicted to emit radiation. Hawking’s 1974 work...

Photo by Yong Chuan Tan on Unsplash This guest post is authored by Janna Levin (@jannalevin), the Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Janna has contributed to an...

In 2015, after a century of uncertainty, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) first observed gravitational waves from the collision of black holes. A decade prior, a scientist named Carlos...