A new computer simulation shows how a black hole’s titanic gravity warps space and bends the light emitted by super-heated debris in a surrounding accretion disc.
New computer simulations show tangled magnetic fields in jets streaming away from supermassive black holes may be creating powerful electric fields and currents accelerating particles to enormous energies
Astronomers are getting their best views yet of supermassive black holes in the cores of colliding galaxies moving toward mergers, rapidly growing as they gorge on stellar debris
Observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory of two five-billion-solar-mass black holes at the cores of two ancient ‘red nugget’ galaxies show they squelched star formation early on while consuming surrounding gas.
Black holes devouring nearby stars generate a variety of effects, but a new model suggests what is seen on Earth depends on the hole’s orientation and the viewing angle. Surveys are planned to search for more such tidal disruption events.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected a dozen X-ray binaries containing stellar-mass black holes near the core of the Milky Way. Theoretical analysis indicates thousand more likely are lurking unseen.
Many, if not all, large galaxies host supermassive black holes, including the Milky Way. A new study predicts such galaxies likely host more than one, far from the galactic core, the result of earlier mergers.
Stars forming in galaxies appear to be influenced by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, but the mechanism of how that happens has not been clear to astronomers until now.
The James Webb Space Telescope should start returning its first scientific results by the end of 2019, and scientists recently announced a slate of observations selected to whet the appetites of astronomers who will use the multibillion-dollar facility well into the 2020s.