AstroPhysics & Cosmology

The dual black hole system, dubbed LID-1166, is the first close-separation pair of its kind confirmed this early in the universe. The discovery could help to explain how the earliest black holes grew so large, so fast.

A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra's research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like a cosmic nursery, giving birth to planets more massive than Jupiter.

An international team of scientists has used machine learning to identify seven rare quasar candidates, according to a

Blazars are galaxies with a jet aimed almost directly at us, and they flicker across every part of the spectrum at once. Almost everything we think we know about them comes from short observing campaigns just a handful of days, every year or two, in one narrow band of energy. A Polish and German team has now done the opposite, following a single blazar for nearly twenty years with two orbiting observatories and in two observations from 2012 they found something in the spectrum that nobody had predicted.

Astronomers have captured an unprecedented image of a cosmic recycling project in progress—fragments of a dying star being busted up, stripped and absorbed into interstellar space.

The building blocks of rocky planets may have begun forming just 100 million years after the Big Bang—long before the first galaxies even existed—according to new research from the University of Portsmouth.

How bad timing, a studio in financial turmoil, and a movie that looked nothing like the cartoon conspired to defeat the most powerful man in the universe.

In the image above, a faint trail of stars can be seen stretching across the galaxy. These structures, known as globular cluster stellar streams, are coherent stellar structures that retain a record of their dynamical history and can provide unique insights into the evolution of galaxies and the nature of dark matter.

There is a question that often comes up at every public talk I do, and I have never had a good answer to it—well, not an entirely confident one. What's inside a black hole? The textbook reply is a singularity. Cross the event horizon, and everything falls inward to a point of infinite density where our equations return nonsense. It isn't so much an answer as an admission that we've run out of physics.

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For more than two decades, the quasar PHL 1811 has been considered the prototype of a rare class of "intrinsically X-ray weak" quasars, thought to produce unusually little X-ray radiation. But in 2024, the Einstein Probe spacecraft caught the object in a bright X-ray flare. In a new study, astronomers combined that observation with more than 20 years of archival data to revisit the mystery. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 28.

First glimpsed as “little red dots” in deep-space images from the James Webb Space Telescope, these giant, gas-shrouded black holes are full of surprises

A distant black hole star is providing strong evidence that these objects lie at the hearts of the mysterious little red dots found shortly after the Big Bang by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Little red dots have puzzled astronomers since their discovery in James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) data from the universe's deep past. Their "powering engines" might resemble a newly discovered phenomenon dubbed a "black hole star"—an early, rapidly growing black hole wrapped in dense gas. This object, described in a study published today in Nature by researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and international collaborators, may help explain how billion-solar-mass black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.

Some black holes roaming the Universe today may actually be older than the Big Bang. A new cosmic “bounce” model suggests the Universe expanded from an earlier contracting phase, allowing ancient black holes to survive the transition as cosmic fossils. These relics could potentially explain dark matter and why surprisingly massive objects appeared so early in cosmic history.

A shot so spectacular it will leave other astrophotographers green with envy.

An international team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has identified three actively accreting supermassive black holes in the galaxy J0148-4214. Matter is falling into the black holes from accretion disks surrounding them.

This dying star appears to have a face of gas and a mane of space dust

Thermodynamics can describe the mechanics of black holes that change over time The post Physicists extend Hawking’s black hole laws to dynamical objects appeared first on Physics World.

New images from the James Webb telescope show a galaxy with a trio of supermassive black holes. Two of them appear to be locked in a tight tango.

The LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (LVK) detector network comprises three centers across the globe. The United States hosts twin Laser Interferometer

New images from the James Webb telescope show a galaxy with a trio of supermassive black holes. Two of them appear to be locked in a tight tango.

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A new celestial map not only catalogs a variety of cosmic objects but also serves as a pointer for other telescopes on Earth and in space.

Hunting for dark matter usually means building something enormous and burying it — a tank of liquid xenon in a mine, a magnet the size of a lorry, decades of engineering and a great deal of money. A team in Japan have just done it differently. They realised that the Earth's own magnetic field is larger than any magnet we could ever construct, and that the gap between the ground and the ionosphere behaves as a natural resonating cavity, ringing at around eight cycles per second. If dark matter is what some theorists suspect, it should leave a faint hum in that cavity. So they went looking, not with a new instrument, but in ten years of geomagnetic readings already recorded at a quiet observatory in Dumfriesshire in Scotland.

Ask what lies inside a black hole and the honest answer has always been a bit of a shrug and something about a singularity, a point where density becomes infinite and physics stops being able to tell you anything at all. It is the most unsatisfying answer in astrophysics, second only perhaps to what happened before the Big Bang. Now two theorists in China have produced a solution in which something else sits inside the horizon entirely, a neutron star, whole and intact, twelve kilometres across, its interior perfectly well behaved and apparently defying the laws of physics.

"It's part of the fabric of astronomy research now."

Astronomers have nearly doubled the number of known cosmic X-ray sources.

University of Missouri researchers have uncovered evidence that challenges one of astronomy's most trusted assumptions, a breakthrough that could reshape how scientists measure galaxies and reconstruct the history of the universe.

Using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has discovered that dust and water can form and survive surprisingly close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. The observations reveal that the evolved star IRS 3 continues to enrich its surroundings with newly formed material despite the intense radiation environment around Sagittarius A*.

Scientists have identified the edge of galaxy IC 1101 and crowned it with the title of largest known galaxy.

Correcting heat-induced distortions in interferometer mirrors will dramatically increase the sensitivity of gravitational-wave detectors The post Thermal imaging technique helps overcome a major problem for gravitational-wave astronomy appeared first on Physics World.

Andromeda has slowed its star-forming rate over the last 40 million years. Scientists think they finally know why.

Hold on to your telescopes: The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team has released the largest-ever 2D color map of the universe. The 5.6-trillion-pixel map contains nearly 4 billion celestial objects, primarily stars and galaxies. The data is available for all to use and publicly view through the Legacy Survey Sky Viewer.

Since it became operational in 2022, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has released some truly breathtaking views of the cosmos. These images highlight how advancements since the days of the venerable Hubble Space Telescope are now providing the deepest and clearest views of the cosmos to date. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Rotational super-radiance observed for twisted radio waves The post Artificially-rotating system reflects radiation like a black hole appeared first on Physics World.

Composing some 85% of the universe's total mass, dark matter betrays its presence only through gravity, unlike ordinary matter. Yet through new research published in Physical Review D, a team led by David Dunsky of New York University has proposed a new way to hunt for the elusive substance. Their approach involves searching for the decay of dark matter particles into gravitons: the hypothetical particles thought to carry the force of gravity itself.

With a field of view 100 times larger than Hubble’s, NASA’s newest mission will scour the universe for distant worlds and clues about dark energy. Learn about what sets it apart from other space telescopes. 

Homer Dávila Gutierrez, director of SKYCR.ORG, has identified a gravitational arc candidate in the galaxy cluster MACS J0308.9+2645 from public data from the James Webb Space Telescope. The object had not been previously reported and is located at a photometric redshift close to 4.4. The preprint is available on arXiv and the manuscript is under review in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Japan.

The James Webb Space Telescope's strange "little red dots" may be evolving into spiral galaxies.

The origin of spin in spiral and elliptical galaxies has posed a long-standing puzzle for astronomers. One idea, known as tidal torque theory, proposes that galaxies' spins are an imprinted record of the early universe, imparted by gravity long before galaxies first formed and still detectable in galaxies today.

Using a detector filled with nearly 9 metric tons of liquid xenon, researchers have delivered some of the most sensitive dark matter results ever recorded. In the latest analysis from the XENON collaboration, working at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, researchers carried out a "blind" test to avoid bias in measurements of the XENONnT detector, pushing the experiment's sensitivity to unprecedented levels.

Astronomers have found evidence that one of the most massive white dwarfs known has an oxygen-neon core instead of the more common carbon-oxygen core. The finding is important because the composition of a white dwarf's core determines how it will evolve. A paper outlining this discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Voyager 1 is running low on power for science, but a successful energy-saving maneuver on Voyager 2 raises hope that the 50-year-old spacecraft can keep going.

The PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission from the European Space Agency (ESA) has successfully completed

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V) has announced its 20th public data release (DR20), delivering a dramatic expansion of the Milky Way Mapper (MWM) scientific survey—the most detailed spectroscopic map yet assembled of stars in and around our home galaxy.

A new study analyzing the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spectra of more than 1,400 galaxies suggests a surprisingly small group of "leaky" galaxies was responsible for cosmic reionization. The paper outlining this work was posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 24.

A supermassive black hole has been found lurking about 30,000 light-years from the center of its galaxy—the first dormant black hole detected so far from a galactic core. It revealed itself only after shredding a passing star and producing a brief, brilliant flare. Astronomers think it may be the remnant of a devoured galaxy or a black hole flung outward during a chaotic cosmic encounter.

As more powerful observatories have allowed astronomers to peer farther back in time and push the observable edge

NASA's Roman Space Telescope wasn't designed for asteroid hunting, but its massive field of view makes it a powerful addition to Earth's planetary defense network.

A team of telescopes around the world, including the newly activated Vera C. Rubin Observatory, joined forces to observe the first shocking moments of a supernova explosion in unprecedented detail.

Black holes are fascinating regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing, even light, can escape them. The largest known black holes, called supermassive black holes, contain millions to billions of times the mass of the sun and are typically located at the centers of galaxies.

"The box is the most powerful thing ever created."

Astronomers have speculated about the mysterious "little red dots" seen through the James Webb Space Telescope's images of the early universe: They could be galaxies, black holes, quasi-stars, starbursts ... or something else entirely.

Using observations from multiple powerful telescopes, a team of astronomers studied a red quasar nicknamed "the Hatchling" at redshift 3.7. They may have identified one of the clearest examples yet of a quasar caught in transition between a heavily obscured and fully exposed phase.

Astronomers have captured the death of a massive star from its first faint flash of X-rays, revealing an unusual supernova.

Our understanding of the universe remains solid, say astronomers whose new study has found the expansion of the

At the end of August, NASA is set to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its quest is to help us better understand how the universe works, from the glue-like dark matter that keeps galaxies together to the elusive dark energy that drives the expansion of the cosmos.…

The German eROSITA Consortium (eROSITA-DE), led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE), has released its

Wormholes are one way that physicists have imagined traveling into the past. But if something gets there, is it physically possible to change anything?

Data released by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) marks a landmark expansion in the study of accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs). As part of the fifth generation of the survey (SDSS-V), the Black Hole Mapper (BHM) program is providing unprecedented insights into the masses, growth and physics of quasars and active galactic nuclei (AGN) across cosmic time.

Mary Trump attributes Donald Trump's relentless pursuit of wealth and power to emotional neglect in childhood, stemming from unresolved emotional needs rather than political ambition.

Properties of a merger remnant can be predicted using a simple entropy-maximization principle The post Physicists find unexpected connection between black hole mergers and thermodynamics appeared first on Physics World.

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Astronomers may have already scanned millions of more stars than they thought, a realization that might lead to new ways to hunt for extraterrestrial radio signals.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has discovered 31 of the most ancient quasars ever found. Two of these

The orbiting observatory in minifigure scale.

So far, almost all stellar-mass black holes detected by astronomers have been found in binary systems. However, astronomers have long suspected that these binary black holes are the exception and that, within the Milky Way, most exist on their own.

When atomic nuclei smash together at nearly the speed of light, they create the hottest fluid in the universe, but scientists may have overlooked one of its most important forces. New simulations reveal that extreme acceleration builds up along the edges of quark-gluon plasma, helping drive its explosive expansion. This acceleration may do far more than move the fluid, potentially changing its temperature-like behavior, influencing particle spins, and even reshaping how matter transitions between fundamental states.

Astronomers have discovered that the feeding frenzy of a distant black hole ended with a windy outburst.

Universal Pictures has become the first studio in 2026 to surpass £3.16 billion at the global box office, driven by hits like 'The Odyssey' and 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie'.

Dark matter particles may exert a hidden force on one another, but its effects are stranger than expected. An extra attraction helps the particles cluster, yet it also makes dark matter effectively lighter as the Universe expands. That weakens its gravitational impact and usually slows the growth of cosmic structure rather than accelerating it.

The most famous giant spiral galaxy in the universe has been revealed not to be the star factory it once was, just as NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to unlock even more breathtaking cosmic insights.

Primordial black holes may occasionally pass through white dwarf stars and trigger enormous Type Ia supernova explosions. Researchers found that these events could explain chemical patterns seen in supernova remnants, nearby explosions, and stars across the Milky Way.

A black hole observed during a dramatic 2023 eruption did not simply devour gas from its nearby companion star. It also expelled large amounts of material through powerful jets and winds, even after the outburst had nearly faded. The results suggest black holes may continue reshaping their surroundings long after their brightest fireworks end.

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Astronomers found seven rare quasar gravitational lens candidates using AI, providing a powerful new tool for studying black hole and galaxy evolution.

There are a number of things in the Universe that could wipe out life as we know it, but — for now, and for Earth — a blast from our galaxy's supermassive black hole isn't one of them. That's not to say that Sagittarius A* doesn't pose a danger. If it wakes up someday and blasts out a strong wind, that definitely could affect Earth. It could well have powered a quasar in the past, and could do so again.

Amidst a cooling job market, laid-off workers in the US are turning to content creation on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, seeking income and flexibility that traditional jobs no longer guarantee.

Researchers have obtained the deepest images ever taken of IC 1101, allowing them to identify the galaxy's outer edge for the first time. The observations confirm it as the largest known galaxy, spanning roughly 520 kiloparsecs, or about 1.7 million light-years, and containing an estimated 3.4 trillion solar masses in stars. The paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 16.

The formation and evolution of individual stars in a galaxy shape the evolution of the galaxy itself. Stars and stellar remnants make up the vast majority of a galaxy's mass, so it's not surprising that the stellar population affects the evolution of galaxies. In the Milky Way's disk and bulge, stars and dead stars make up about 85% of the baryonic mass.

Galaxies in the infancy of the Universe are the building blocks of more modern galaxies. They began as small "shreds" of material that coalesced over time to form larger ones. That's why astronomers use observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study the young Universe. The light from those early objects appears in the infrared part of the spectrum, which JWST is tuned to see.

Black holes are often portrayed as cosmic gluttons that swallow everything that comes too close. But new observations of a dramatic black hole outburst—led by Warwick Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Noel Castro Segura—suggest the reality is much messier.

Primordial black holes (PBH) remain hypothetical, but that isn't stopping astrophysicists from figuring out how they could interact with other stellar objects. New research shows how PBHs, formed in the early Universe from collapsing pockets of dense subatomic matter instead of from stars, can enter white dwarfs. In some cases, that could've triggered a Type Ia supernova with particular chemical fingerprints, which should be detectable.

In this July 6, 2026, image, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, exposing the dusty structures and hidden activity that shape this unusual system.

From this latest trailer it's apparent that weird shape-shifting Manhunters will be primary antagonists in HBO's upcoming series "Lanterns."

Where do gold, platinum and uranium come from? This question has fascinated astrophysicists and nuclear physicists for decades. A research team from Technische Universität Darmstadt has now taken an important step toward understanding the origin of heavy elements. Their findings are published in Physical Review Letters.

A spacecraft meant to push NASA’s Swift Observatory to a higher orbit malfunctioned and started tumbling several days ago. Engineers think it can still succeed.