A bright quasar, powered by a supermassive black hole, is blasting out radiation that pushes away clouds of gas in its surroundings to generate winds reaching speeds of around 36 million miles per hour (58 million kilometers per hour). Oh, and the quasar is also nearly as old as the universe itself. The discovery, made by […]
It’s a bit of a myth that black holes pull everything in. Much of the matter that finds itself falling towards the black hole is actually spat back out, thanks to powerful magnetic fields that are able to levitate charged particles out of a black hole’s accretion disk and accelerate them away. For a long […]
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronomers are witnessing a never-before-seen spectacle in the cosmos: the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. In late 2019, a team of astronomers took notice of an otherwise […]
By Will Dunham WASHINGTON (Reuters) – At the center of the Milky Way galaxy resides a supermassive black hole four million times the mass of our sun called Sagittarius A* that some scientists have called a gentle giant because of its quiescence. But someday it could become a beast. Researchers said on Tuesday they have […]
Astronomers have spotted flares and echos coming from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). These “cosmic fireworks” and X-ray echoes could help scientists better understand the dark and quiet cosmic titan around which our galaxy orbits. The team of Michigan State University researchers made the groundbreaking […]
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time ever, mapped the plasma “burps” of a feeding supermassive black hole-powered quasar that dwells relatively close to Earth. While supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun are thought to dwell at the heart of all galaxies, not […]
The “wobbling” remains of a star that suffered a grisly death at the maw of a supermassive black hole has helped reveal the speed at which its cosmic predator spins. Supermassive black holes are believed to be born through successive mergers of smaller black holes, each of which brings with it angular momentum that speeds […]
Smaller black holes can meet and merge in the wake of supermassive black holes. This may be because of the turbulence created by overlapping accretion disks and torque effects. Supermassive black holes form the cores of many galaxies, including the Milky Way. In new research, scientists analyze how supermassive black holes at the heart of […]
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescope, scientists have discovered a new cosmic “exhaust vent” funneling hot gas away from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole that sits at the very heart of our Milky Way galaxy. The newly discovered vent is linked to a chimney-like formation orientated at a right angle in the […]
How do you satiate the hunger of a supermassive black hole? With light-years-long rivers of cosmic dust, astronomers say. Scientists have found evidence of remarkably long dust streams spiraling in toward the supermassive black hole living at the heart of our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda. It would appear that these giant streams quietly, but continuously, feed […]
Black hole week is in full swing at this point, and to celebrate, NASA has released stunning observations of the heart of a distant spiral galaxy — as well as the monster supermassive black hole that dwells in that heart. The observations were conducted by the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM), led by the […]
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has observed light from stars surrounding some of the earlier supermassive black holes in the universe — black holes seen as they were less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The observations conducted by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) addresses the question of […]