Astronomers find the longest black hole jets ever seen
Black holes often appear in science fiction movies, largely because elements of their existence are still a mystery.
They have fascinating impacts on the surrounding...
The early universe had a lot of black holes
The Hubble Deep Field and its successor, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, showed us how vast our Universe is and how it teems with galaxies...
The Milky Way’s supermassive black hole might have formed 9 billion years ago
Large galaxies like ours are hosts to Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs.)
They can be so massive that they resist comprehension, with some of them having...
Two supermassive black holes on a collision course with each other
Galaxy collisions are foundational events in the Universe. They happen when two systems mingle stars in a cosmic dance.
They also cause spectacular mergers of...
Dark matter could have driven the growth of early supermassive black holes
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) keeps finding supermassive black holes (SMBH) in the early Universe.
They’re in active galactic nuclei seen only 500,000 years...
What if you flew your warp drive spaceship into a black hole?
Warp drives have a long history of not existing, despite their ubiquitous presence in science fiction.
Writer John Campbell first introduced the idea in a...
Life needs black holes to survive
Life is rare, and it requires exactly the right environmental mix to establish itself. And there’s one surprising contributor to that perfect mix: gigantic...
Did dark matter help create giant black holes in the early universe?
Supermassive black holes, like the one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, take an incredibly long time to form.
Typically, a black hole...
How a black hole in orbit around a planet could be a sign of...
In 1971, English mathematical physicist and Nobel-prize winner Roger Penrose proposed how energy could be extracted from a rotating black hole.
He argued that this...
We know when a black hole will have its next feast
Black holes are notoriously destructive to stars near them. Astronomers often see flashes representing the death throes of stars collapsing past the event horizon,...