Since the first observation of merging black holes in 2015, astrophysicists have been repeatedly surprised by their large masses. They originally expected...
Variations in the brightness of light seen from around a stellar-mass black hole in the binary system MAXI J1820+070 were caused by a huge warp in its...
The intermediate-mass black hole in question was caught in the act of swallowing a star, called a tidal disruption event. Dubbed 3XMM J215022.4-055108,...
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found thousands of dense gas clumps but, surprisingly, no star formation,...
In 1974, Stephen Hawking made the seminal discovery that black holes emit thermal radiation. Previous to that, black holes were believed to be inert. In...
By combining gravitational lensing with the capabilities of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have detected two X-ray-emitting objects —...
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have detected a set of eight X-ray rings around a low-mass black...
Using ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s NuSTAR space telescopes, astronomers have observed X-ray flares emitted from around the supermassive black hole in...
While most of the binary black-hole mergers recently detected by NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States...
Astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration have imaged a jet in the heart of the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A and identified the...
Black holes are famously compact objects where the paths of light are drastically bent by the curvature of space-time. While light itself cannot escape...
Palomar 5 is one of the sparsest star clusters in the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy and is best known for its spectacular tidal tails, spanning over 20...
Hawking’s black-hole area theorem, also known as the second law of black hole mechanics, states that the total horizon area of a classical black hole...
Astronomers using NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States and by the Virgo detector in Italy have observed...
Singularities play an interesting role in physics, and come in many different varieties, from the mathematically and philosophically challenging to the...
Astrophysical observations show that supermassive black holes exist when the Universe is just 800 million years old after the Big Bang (just 6% of its...
Gravitational-wave and electromagnetic observations of neutron-star-black-hole mergers can provide precise local measurements of the Universe’s rate...
The newly-discovered stellar-mass black hole candidate is a binary companion to a nearby red giant called V723 Mon.
An artist’s impression of the V723...