Tag Archive for 'Stellar-mass black hole'

Black holes are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields that can be found today in the Universe and are ideal laboratories for testing Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the strong field regime. In his article, Professor Bambi shows that the possibility of an interstellar mission to send a small spacecraft to the nearest black hole, although very speculative and extremely challenging, is not completely unrealistic. Image credit: Cosimo Bambi, doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.113142.

Astrophysicist Proposes Interstellar Mission to Study Black Holes

Aug 11, 2025 by News Staff

In a new paper published in the journal iScience, an astrophysicist from Fudan University discusses the possibility of sending a nanocraft to a black hole...

An infographic detailing the GW231123 black hole merger. Image credit: Simona J. Miller / Caltech.

Astrophysicists Detect Gravitational Waves from Most Massive Black Hole Merger to Date

Jul 15, 2025 by News Staff

Using twin detectors of NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), astrophysicists with the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA (LVK) Collaboration...

An artist’s impression of V404 Cygni: the central black hole (black dot) is in the process of consuming a nearby star (orange body at left), while a second star (upper white flash) orbits at a much farther distance. Image credit: Jorge Lugo.

Black Hole-Hosting Binary V404 Cygni is Actually Part of Triple System, Astrophysicists Say

Oct 24, 2024 by News Staff

The well-studied V404 Cygni, an X-ray binary hosting a low-mass black hole, is part of a wide hierarchical triple with a tertiary companion at least 3,500...

Halo around Cygnus X-3. Image credit: NASA.

IXPE Discovers New Ultra-Luminous X-ray Source in Milky Way

Jun 25, 2024 by News Staff

Cygnus X-3, an X-ray binary system located some 7,400 parsecs (24,136 light-years) in the constellation of Cygnus, represents a class of ultra-luminous...

The location of the first three black holes discovered by ESA’s Gaia mission in the Milky Way. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC.

Surprisingly Massive Stellar-Mass Black Hole Detected in Nearby Binary System

Apr 16, 2024 by Natali Anderson

Using data from ESA’s Gaia mission, astronomers have discovered a nearby binary system composed of a giant star orbiting a dormant black hole of of stellar...

The hyperluminous star-forming galaxy GN-z11 hosts an accreting black hole. Image credit: NASA / ESA / P. Oesch, Yale University / G. Brammer, STScI / P. van Dokkum, Yale University / G. Illingworth, University of California, Santa Cruz / Sci.News.

Webb Detects Small and Vigorous Black Hole in Early Universe

Jun 6, 2023 by Sergio Prostak

The newly-discovered black hole resides in the hyperluminous galaxy GN-z11 at a redshift of 11 and could have originated from a stellar mass seed at redshifts...

Siraj & Loeb explore the possibility that accretion flares resulting from the tidal disruption of small Oort Cloud bodies by a putative primordial black hole could power an observable optical signal that could be searched for with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Image credit: Sci-News.com / Zdeněk Bardon / ESO.

New Research Explores Behavior of Intermediate-Mass Black Holes

Apr 26, 2023 by Enrico de Lazaro

Intermediate-mass black holes in the mass range between 100 and 100,000 solar masses are the missing link between stellar-mass black holes and super massive...

The location of Gaia BH2 and Gaia BH1 in the Milky Way. This map of our Galaxy was also made by the Gaia mission. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Gaia Discovers Its Second Black Hole

Apr 4, 2023 by News Staff

The newly-discovered dormant black hole, named Gaia BH2, is orbited by a red giant star, and has a mass of 8.9 solar masses. The location of Gaia BH2 and...

An artist’s impression of a stellar-mass black hole in a binary system. Image credit: Education University of Hong Kong.

Astronomers Find Evidence for Dark Matter Density Spikes around Stellar-Mass Black Holes

Mar 6, 2023 by News Staff

It has been suggested for a long time that dark matter would form a density spike around a black hole. However, no promising evidence has been observed...

A neutron star (blue sphere) spins in the center of a colorful disk of gas, some of which follows the magnetic field (blue lines) and flows (blue-white arcs) onto the object’s surface. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab.

Astronomers Discover Short-Lived Superheavy Neutron Stars

Jan 10, 2023 by News Staff

Astronomers have examined data about 700 short gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) detected with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope,...

This image shows the location of the binary system Gaia DR3 4373465352415301632. Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey / Chakrabart et al.

Astronomers Discover Stellar-Mass Black Hole 1,550 Light-Years Away

Oct 20, 2022 by Natali Anderson

The newly-discovered black hole resides in the binary system Gaia DR3 4373465352415301632 with a main-sequence star that is slightly smaller than the Sun....

This artist’s conception shows two supermassive black holes, similar to those observed by Bansal et al, orbiting one another more than 750 million light years from Earth. Image credit: Josh Valenzuela, University of New Mexico.

Astronomers Identify Peculiar Twisting Motion in Binary Black Hole System

Oct 18, 2022 by News Staff

This is the first time such an effect, known as precession, has been seen in black holes, where the twisting is 10 billion times faster than in previous...

This artist’s impression shows what the binary system VFTS 243 might look like if we were observing it up close. The system, which is located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is composed of a hot, blue star with 25 times the Sun’s mass and a black hole, which is at least nine times the mass of the Sun. The sizes of the two binary components are not to scale: in reality, the blue star is about 200,000 times larger than the black hole. Image credit: ESO / L. Calçada.

Dormant Stellar-Mass Black Hole Detected in Tarantula Nebula

Jul 18, 2022 by News Staff

The newly-detected black hole is a member of the binary system VFTS 243, which is located in the famous Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This...

Multi-wavelength image of Westerhout 50 (red - radio, green - optical, yellow - soft X-rays, magenta - medium energy X-rays, cyan - hard X-ray emission). The eastern lobe X-ray image highlights the XMM-Newton data (with the brightening at the edge of the field of view cropped here to highlight the source emission). The western lobe X-ray image shows only partial Chandra coverage of part of the nebula. Image credit: Safi-Harb et al., arXiv: 2207.00573.

Astronomers Find Evidence for Unusual Particle Acceleration in Manatee Nebula

Jul 5, 2022 by Sergio Prostak

Using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and its Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have...

The star-filled sky in this Hubble photo lies in the direction of the Galactic center. The light from stars is monitored to see if any change in their apparent brightness is caused by a foreground object drifting in front of them. The warping of space by the interloper would momentarily brighten the appearance of a background star, an effect called gravitational lensing. One such event, OB110462, is shown in the four close-up frames at the bottom. The arrow points to a star that momentarily brightened, as first captured by Hubble in August 2011. This was caused by a foreground black hole drifting in front of the star, along our line of sight. The star brightened and then subsequently faded back to its normal brightness as the black hole passed by. Because a black hole doesn’t emit or reflect light, it cannot be directly observed. But its unique thumbprint on the fabric of space can be measured through these so-called microlensing events. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / K. Sahu, STScI / J. DePasquale, STScI.

Hubble Detects Free-Floating Compact Object 5,000 Light-Years Away

Jun 13, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers have for the first time discovered what may be an isolated stellar-mass black hole using the astrometric microlensing technique. They estimate...

An artist’s impression of a black hole X-ray binary. Image credit: Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.

NICER Detects Echoes from Eight Black Hole X-Ray Binaries

May 2, 2022 by News Staff

As a stellar-mass black hole pulls in gas and dust from an orbiting star, it can give off spectacular bursts of X-rays that bounce and echo off the inspiraling...

The four galaxies shown in this graphic are among 29 galaxies in the sample that showed evidence for growing black holes near their centers. X-rays from Chandra (blue) have been overlaid on optical images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxies NGC 1385, NGC 1566, NGC 3344, and NGC 6503. The boxes that appear in the roll-over outline the location of the burgeoning black holes. Image credit: NASA / CXC / Washington State University / Baldassare et al. / ESA / STScI.

Massive Black Holes Form in Dense Stellar Environments, Study Suggests

Apr 21, 2022 by News Staff

Black holes are demolishing thousands of stars in a quest to pack on weight, according to an analysis of images of 108 galaxies taken by NASA’s Chandra...

An artist’s impression of HR 6819, a close binary consisting of a stripped B-type star (background) and a rapidly rotating Be star (foreground). Image credit: ESO / L. Calçada.

HR 6819 is Binary System with No Black Hole, Astronomers Say

Mar 4, 2022 by News Staff

HR 6819, a highly intriguing object that was recently proposed as a multiple system containing a stellar-mass black hole, is in fact a binary star system...

An artist’s impression of a group of stellar-mass black holes in the center of NGC 6397. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / N. Bartmann.

Universe is Teeming with Quintillions of Stellar-Mass Black Holes

Jan 19, 2022 by Enrico de Lazaro

A team of astrophysicists from Italy and the United Kingdom has calculated that in the observable Universe, a sphere of diameter around 90 billion light-years,...

This artist’s impression shows NGC 1850 BH1 and a massive star orbiting it. The distortion of the star’s shape is due to the strong gravitational force exerted by the black hole. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.

Astronomers Detect Stellar-Mass Black Hole in Large Magellanic Cloud

Nov 12, 2021 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have discovered a low-mass black hole in the...

12 3