Black Holes

Around 12 million light-years away, the supermassive black hole of the galaxy Centaurus A is hurling two enormous plasma jets into space at nearly the speed of light. These so-called jets are brighter at their edges than at their center. The reason for this was previously unclear but has now been explained by a team from the Chair of Astronomy at the University of Würzburg. The research is published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Nature is the foremost international weekly scientific journal in the world and is the flagship journal for Nature Portfolio. It publishes the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Nature publishes landmark papers, award winning news, leading comment and expert opinion on important, topical scientific news and events that enable readers to share the latest discoveries in science and evolve the discussion amongst the global scientific community.

Nature is the foremost international weekly scientific journal in the world and is the flagship journal for Nature Portfolio. It publishes the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Nature publishes landmark papers, award winning news, leading comment and expert opinion on important, topical scientific news and events that enable readers to share the latest discoveries in science and evolve the discussion amongst the global scientific community.

The oldest pair of compact quasars ever observed has been found only 900 million years after the Big Bang. Scientists say there is no theoretical explanation for how the pair of actively feeding black holes grew so massive at such an early time in the history of the universe. The pair of quasars has been given the Hawaiian nickname Nāpōwawāʻenakaulua.

Author(s): Isaac Legred, Jacob Golomb, and Katerina ChatziioannouStars collapsing directly into black holes might explain the surprising number of merging black holes of about 10 solar masses. [Phys. Rev. D 114, 103023] Published Tue Nov 10, 2026

When the most massive stars in the universe die, they often detonate in fiery supernovae, dramatically blasting most of their matter into space. The remaining stellar cores collapse into neutron stars and, sometimes, black holes. However, theories suggest that some massive stars might die without a bang, instead directly collapsing inward to become neutron stars or black holes.

Black hole jet ejections are powerful outbursts of high-energy photons and particles that provide insights into extreme astrophysical processes. However, predicting when they will occur remains difficult. In a study, researchers from Japan analyzed observations of four black hole binary systems, identifying decreases in the accretion disk's inner radius and changes in emitted X-ray variability as possible predictors for jet ejection. Their findings could help astronomers forecast these phenomena more accurately and coordinate timely observations.

According to Lucio Caracciolo, editor of the geopolitics journal Limes, Europe should offer "a real restructuring plan that will require hundreds of billions and at least two generations to implement"

New research suggests that Little Red Dots, which have puzzled astronomers since the JWST began discovering them, could host primordial black holes born during the Big Bang.

Chinese scientists have developed a first-of-its-kind purifier capable of removing breakaway tumour cells that circulate through the bloodstream, potentially preventing the recurrence and spread of some cancers. The Shanghai Jiao Tong University-led team said the proof-of-concept platform could lower the risk of metastasis – the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide – in a peer-reviewed research paper published on November 2. When tested in mouse models of breast cancer, the device...

Primordial black holes are hypothetical objects that could have formed directly from dense clumps of matter in the very early universe. If they exist, their dramatic origins would set them apart from the black holes we see today, which form when massive stars collapse. Some theories suggest that "stupendously large" primordial black holes could account for a significant share of the universe's elusive dark matter.

Optical cavities are pairs of light-trapping mirrors and underpin the operation of lasers, atomic clocks and many types of precision sensors. If the distance between the mirrors is changed rapidly enough, some theories predict that the waves inside them should bunch together into short, intense pulses. So far, however, this prediction has never been tested directly.

Johns Hopkins researchers searching the expanse of the universe for the existence of the first black holes are zeroing in on little red dots that may hold the key to the theoretical phenomenon.

Author(s): Susan CurtisUsing sheets of light to corral waves of ultracold atoms, researchers have created an experimental platform for studying the event horizons of black holes. [Physics 19, 149] Published Wed Nov 04, 2026

So far, observations by instruments including the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed the presence of surprisingly massive black holes in the early universe. Even less than a billion years after the Big Bang, some of these bodies already weighed billions of times the mass of the sun, and to date, astronomers are unclear as to how they could have grown so large so quickly.

Collisions between stars in the early universe were common, and this could explain the growth of supermassive black holes and the existence of strange Little Red Dots seen by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Astrophysicists think that the supermassive black holes (SMBH) we see in the modern universe are the result of a long, drawn-out process. That process is referred to as the hierarchical black hole mergers framework. It explains how some SMBHs can reach such staggering masses. Some of the most massive appear to have billions of solar masses.

Scientists have discovered a possible loophole in the laws that normally prevent black holes from splitting apart, suggesting that extremely fast-spinning black holes might divide into two. The surprising finding raises the possibility of an entirely new black hole phenomenon that future telescopes could potentially detect.

Author(s): Yiqin Chen, Shi-Yi Zhao, Xingjiang Zhu, N. D. Ramesh Bhat, Jacob Cardinal Tremblay, Małgorzata Curyło, Valentina Di Marco, George Hobbs, Wenhua Ling, Rami F. Mandow, Richard N. Manchester, Saurav Mishra, Daniel J. Reardon, Sparrow Roch, Christopher J. Russell, Ryan M. Shannon, Jingbo Wang, Shuangqiang Wang, and Andrew Zic (PPTA Collaboration)Researchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 191401] Published Mon Nov 02, 2026

Author(s): Sarah Burke-SpolaorResearchers have used radio observations of rapidly spinning neutron stars to search for signals from supermassive black hole pairs at the dawn of galaxy formation. [Physics 19, 146] Published Mon Nov 02, 2026

Astrophysicists think that black holes grow through a hierarchical merger framework. But the elusive Intermediate Mass Black Holes are the missing link between stellar mass black holes, and the gargantuan supermassive black holes like the one at the center of the Milky Way. The JWST may have found the ancient sources of IMBH heavy seeds: young massive clusters in the high-redshift Universe.

We all know that black holes can collide. It has happened since black holes began to form, early in cosmic time. The result is always a clash that gives off gravitational waves and a giant bang. Since black holes have such strong gravity, it's almost impossible to imagine a way that any force could break one apart. Yet, that's the task that a group of scientists in Europe set for themselves.

Have you been keeping up to date with physics news? Try our short quiz to find out The post Quiz of the week: what does a new study reveal about primordial black holes? appeared first on Physics World.

The word "vacuum" may conjure the image of empty space. Maybe you think of a region far outside the solar system without planets, debris, gas clouds or light. According to quantum theory, however, a vacuum is never truly empty. Quantum mechanics extends the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—which states that we cannot measure the position and the velocity of an object exactly at the same time—to a vacuum. The result is that a vacuum can never be still.

Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman explains how capturing the first image of a black hole required a telescope the size of the world, and why the next goal is to create a movie. The post How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Nature is the foremost international weekly scientific journal in the world and is the flagship journal for Nature Portfolio. It publishes the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Nature publishes landmark papers, award winning news, leading comment and expert opinion on important, topical scientific news and events that enable readers to share the latest discoveries in science and evolve the discussion amongst the global scientific community.

Nature is the foremost international weekly scientific journal in the world and is the flagship journal for Nature Portfolio. It publishes the finest peer-reviewed research in all fields of science and technology on the basis of its originality, importance, interdisciplinary interest, timeliness, accessibility, elegance and surprising conclusions. Nature publishes landmark papers, award winning news, leading comment and expert opinion on important, topical scientific news and events that enable readers to share the latest discoveries in science and evolve the discussion amongst the global scientific community.

Primordial black holes formed in the early universe might experience an extra dimension of space; a recent study suggests new ways to search for these mysterious objects The post Primordial black holes could reveal a hidden fifth dimension appeared first on Physics World.

Scientists have long known that when two black holes collide, they merge to create a more massive black hole. New research suggests that the opposite may happen too: single black holes may split in two.

Dense stellar environments were common in the early Universe. These environments fostered more numerous stellar collisions, and some of those would've been mergers that formed very massive stars. Those stars would've exploded as supernovae, becoming massive black holes, the potential seeds for today's supermassive black holes.

Author(s): Christopher Gerlach, Yann Gouttenoire, Antonio J. Iovino, and Nicholas LeisterPrimordial black holes heavier than 10 11 solar masses generate isocurvature perturbations that exceed current cosmic microwave background limits, ruling them out as a dark matter candidate. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 181401] Published Mon Oct 26, 2026

A new study reveals a dust-reddened quasar from a time when the universe was less than a billion years old. Located at a redshift of 6.5488, the object J1440+0019 contains a rapidly accreting supermassive black hole with a mass of about 1.1 billion suns. The paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Oct. 9.

Astronomers have discovered three actively feeding black holes inside a single galaxy more than 12.5 billion light-years away, revealing a remarkable scene from the universe’s infancy. Two of the black holes are separated by just 620 light-years and are expected to eventually merge, while a third lurks farther away. One weighs an astonishing 80 million suns, and another is growing faster than conventional theories predict.

An international collaboration co-led by an IAS scholar has uncovered a universal rule governing one of the most

Two black holes can collide and merge into one. But could the opposite happen: could a single black hole split into two smaller ones? That question is explored in a new theoretical study: "When Black Holes Admit Pair-of-pants Topologies," published in the journal Physical Review D.

Black holes more massive than entire galaxies are not a major component of dark matter, the mysterious stuff that's thought to make up most of the matter in the cosmos, a new study finds.

SMBH jets are driven by thick, hot accretion disks with powerful magnetic fields. But there's a bit of a paradox. Some SMBH produce jets, even though they appear to have thin, cold accretion disks. New research has solved this paradox, showing that disks can be truncated into an outer cold disk and an inner hot disk.

Theory says that during some SMBH mergers, the merger remnant receives a recoil kick from gravitational waves. Instead of sitting placidly in the galactic center, these recoiled SMBH are sent on a pendulum-like motion, back and forth through the galactic center. New research has found statistical evidence supporting their existence.

By analyzing data on around 100,000 quasars, or extremely luminous galactic nuclei, researchers at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) have found statistical evidence that some supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies are ejected from their positions after forming. The relationship now identified in the data was predicted 10 years ago by members of the same research group, Peter Raffai and Zsolt Frei, together with Zoltán Haiman.

Technion researchers have presented evidence for the existence of solar-storm-like outbursts near supermassive black holes, which can be a million times larger than the sun or more. The phenomenon was discovered in the vicinity of the black hole in the galaxy NGC 3783, and the researchers' findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientific estimates show that there should be between about 100 million and 1 billion stellar-mass black holes in the Milky Way. But they aren't easy to locate. They're not like supermassive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of galaxies. Those are usually easy to spot for different reasons.

New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope reveal a concentration of heavy metals near the Milky Way's central black hole. The discovery deepens a mystery about why our black hole behaves the way it does.

Stellar-mass black holes should be in our neighbourhood within about 50 light years of the Solar System. But they're likely isolated, without much to feed on, making them difficult to find. Gaia found some candidates, but confirming them is tough.

Stellar-mass black holes should be in our neighbourhood within about 50 light years of the Solar System. But they're likely isolated, without much to feed on, making them difficult to find. Gaia found some candidates, but confirming them is tough.

Some supermassive black holes rapidly consume surrounding matter while simultaneously firing powerful streams of plasma into space at nearly the speed of light. However, this creates a physical puzzle: rapid feeding is expected to form a cold, flat accretion disk around the black hole, which prevents powerful jets from forming.

The gas orbiting Sagittarius A (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, is rich in metals, researchers at McGill University's Trottier Space Institute have found. The metal enrichment probably resulted from stars that exploded and released material into the black hole's surroundings over time, they said.

Supermassive black holes power tremendous jets that extend far beyond their galaxy. A new study finds how they can also warm material at the outer edge of a galaxy and reduce the rate of star production over time.

Astronomers have uncovered compelling evidence of two supermassive black holes spiraling toward a potentially spectacular collision at the center of galaxy Mrk 501. A previously unseen jet of particles revealed the likely presence of a second black hole, with observations suggesting the pair completes an orbit every 121 days. Depending on their masses, these cosmic giants could merge in as little as 100 years.

A citizen science project is seeking volunteers to comb through NASA telescope data for telltale signs of the galaxy's hidden black holes.

What looks like a neon pink treble clef floating out in space is actually a bizarre source of radio waves spotted deep in the cosmos.

Astronomers have discovered a star being torn apart by a massive black hole more than 1,000 parsecs from the center of its host galaxy. The tidal disruption event, TDE 2023mfm, was first discovered by ZTF and then studied with a wide range of telescopes, including Keck, Lick, Hubble, Swift, Chandra, XMM-Newton and the VLA. The discovery paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 28.

Scientists have discovered that black holes of vastly different sizes appear to launch powerful jets according to the same universal rule. The breakthrough could explain why some black holes suddenly erupt years after devouring a star and help astronomers predict when these spectacular outbursts will happen.

Astronomers have found two actively feeding supermassive black holes separated by just 175 parsecs (570 light-years) in a galaxy seen when the universe was only about 2 billion years old. The system, MG B2016+112, lies at a redshift of 3.273 and is the most compact dual AGN known at this redshift. The study was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Sept. 25.

Using the NASA spacecraft Swift, astronomers observed a supermassive black hole burping radio jets 300 days after a heavy cosmic meal.

Astronomers have discovered the most distant and earliest blazar, an erupting supermassive black hole aiming its plasma jets directly at Earth.

Every black hole hides a question at its center. Einstein's theory predicts that whatever falls in is crushed into a singularity, a point of infinite density where the theory itself breaks down. Most physicists expect quantum gravity to replace that point with something finite. But the center lies hidden behind the horizon. How could we ever learn what is there?

The Milky Way’s massive black hole is rapidly rotating, and a star in an unprecedentedly close orbit could help measure its spin The post Fastest star in the Milky Way feels the rotation of our central black hole appeared first on Physics World.

According to stellar evolution models, there should be hundreds of millions of black holes floating around in our galaxy. But so far we’ve only found 70. That’s in large part because they are so hard to find, but a citizen science project from the University of Southampton is actively seeking out these hidden monsters with the help of tens of thousands of amateur astronomers through a project on Zooniverse called [Black Hole Hunters](https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/cobalt-lensing/black-hole-hunters).

According to new research, "wandering" black holes may have left an imprint on the Universe as they traveled for billions of years.

In recent decades, astronomers have found evidence that supermassive black holes can really mess with their galaxies' evolution. They gobble up material intended for star formation, quenching the birth of stars. Conversely, jets streaming away from those hungry monsters can also energize gas-rich regions and enhance the chances of a galaxy birthing batches of stars in those areas.

Black holes, despite their extreme nature, are described by surprisingly few basic parameters: their mass, charge and spin. Two black holes may have formed for completely different reasons and passed through very different histories, yet still end up in the same final state. John Wheeler summarized this idea with the famous phrase "black holes have no hair."

A team led by University at Buffalo physicists has found a mathematical solution that shows how a frustrated

Author(s): John M. Mehlhaff, Alexander Y. Chen, Martin Luepker, and Yajie YuanThe first fully kinetic collisionless model of a rotating plasma accreting into a black hole reveals the role of pair creation and the plasma loading of the jet funnel. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 155201] Published Mon Oct 05, 2026

Galactic black holes are cosmic mitochondria, powerhouses of the universe. Most of the energy these supermassive black holes produce comes from the material surrounding them: superheated plasma in their accretion disks interacting with tremendous magnetic fields. But there is a more direct way to extract energy from a black hole. It's known as the Penrose process, and a new study asks whether we could discover a signature of this process.

Primordial black holes (PBHs) don't exist as far as we know. But if they did, these hypothetical objects would have formed in the early universe rather than from dying stars, and they may even make up dark matter. That's not the end of the weirdness. Their formation could have been even stranger if it occurred in a universe with a dark dimension, which is another theoretical construct. It posits that our space includes a hidden extra spatial dimension.

Supermassive black holes generate tremendous amounts of energy through their accretion disks and jets. But they can also generate energy through the magnetic Penrose process. A new study looks at how we might observe this process through multimessenger astronomy.

Astronomers analyzed 2,435 galaxies hosting actively feeding black holes using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Among them, they identified 546 "bulgeless" galaxies—systems with little or no central stellar bulge. Their paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that galaxies without a central bulge grow black holes just as effectively as galaxies that have one—a surprising sign that black holes don't need galaxy mergers to grow normally.

An unexplained high-energy neutrino detected three years ago could be linked to a primordial black hole, perhaps one more even unusual than previously thought

Cosmic detectives are being called on for an interstellar mission to hunt down thousands of invisible black holes lurking in our own backyard. Space scientists from the University of Southampton need amateur astronomers to search for signs that might locate them.

Powerful jets from supermassive black holes can disturb star-forming gas far beyond a galaxy’s visible edge, leaving a glowing trail hundreds of thousands of light-years long. By keeping this gas hot and preventing it from falling inward, the jets may help determine whether a galaxy keeps forming stars or becomes quiet.

The black holes at the hearts of galaxies get the credit and/or blame for a lot of things in their hosts. For example, they take the blame for gobbling up star-forming material, effectively "quenching" starbirth in some areas of galaxies. On the bright side, it now turns out that some of them may be commonly participating in the births of stars, too.

Both stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes can produce ionized jets streaming from their poles. Stellar-mass black holes consume the material of companion stars, while supermassive black holes rip stars apart in tidal disruption events. Despite these different eating habits, the formation of jets requires similar conditions.

Galaxies are enormous and hold hundreds of billions of stars. These stars form from cold, dense gas. Every large galaxy, including the Milky Way, is wrapped in a huge envelope of gas called the circumgalactic medium, or CGM. This reservoir of raw material stretches 10–20 times the size of the visible portion of the galaxy.

A new study from a Yale-led research team suggests that some of the most interesting black holes in

Strike a bell, and it rings with a pitch and a fading that tell you about the bell: its size, its shape, the metal it is made of. Black holes ring too. When two merge, the newborn black hole shivers and sheds gravitational waves in a brief, dying chord, and since 2015, gravitational-wave detectors have been listening. The notes of that chord, which physicists call quasinormal modes, depend only on the black hole's mass and spin and on the law of gravity itself. Change the law, and the chord changes.

As a star nears the end of its life, it faces two very different fates: It can explode as a supernova, leaving behind a neutron star, or collapse and become a black hole. What determines the outcome remains one of astrophysics' great unanswered questions.

If you want to understand the origins of black holes, Yale astronomers say, you need to look beyond the centers of galaxies and start searching in the nooks and crannies. That's where you'll find the "wanderers"—black holes whose journeys may tell the story of how the first black holes formed.

Physicists searching through Large Hadron Collider data found no evidence that the machine has been producing microscopic quantum black holes, but the result sharply narrows where such exotic physics could still be hiding. These hypothetical black holes could form if extra spatial dimensions make gravity much stronger at extremely tiny scales, potentially offering clues toward the long-sought theory of quantum gravity.

A team led by University at Buffalo physicists has found a mathematical solution that shows how a frustrated quantum magnet can transition from ultraslow behavior to ultrafast, highly entangled behavior resembling that of a black hole.

When the James Webb Space Telescope pointed its powerful instruments toward the early universe, scientists were surprised by what it found. At high-redshift (z) values, corresponding to less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang, astronomers witnessed an abundance of galaxies that hosted what appeared to be the "seeds" of supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

Scientists have found evidence that black holes of vastly different sizes may launch powerful jets according to the same universal rule. Supermassive black holes can produce jets soon after tearing apart a star, then fire up again hundreds or thousands of days later when their feeding rate drops to about 2% of the Eddington limit. That same threshold is known to trigger jets from much smaller black holes in the Milky Way.

Scientists theorize that the rapid emergence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early Universe can be explained by the direct-collapse black hole (DCBH) scenario. In a recent study, astronomers investigated the potential host environments of DCBHs and found that this scenario is a plausible explanation for how the "seeds" of SMBH formed.

New research suggests that a perplexing signal created by a pair of colliding black holes may have been warped by a space-time phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This theory could finally explain the "impossible" size of the merging singularities, but it also poses a new problem.

Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have extended the search for evidence of microscopic black holes produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The formation of these tiny, fleeting objects at the LHC represents one way theorists have sought to resolve anomalies in our understanding of the basic structure of spacetime, while the method used to look for them demonstrates a new way of searching for new particles.

An early-career Western Australian astrophysicist has helped uncover a universal rule behind one of the most powerful behaviors in the universe: when black holes launch jets. The discovery, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, shows black holes appear to fire off powerful jets at the same critical point in their feeding cycle—whether they are about 10 times the mass of the sun or millions of times heavier.

Computer simulations find that overmassive black holes form readily in the early universe. Their spectra match that of Little Red Dots, which later become powerful quasars and supermassive galactic black holes.

New supercomputer simulations suggest JWST’s puzzling Little Red Dots are rapidly growing black holes from the early Universe. Extreme radiation may have helped create unusually massive black hole seeds, while dense surrounding gas allowed them to grow dozens of times faster than black holes can today. The simulated objects closely resemble the Little Red Dots seen by Webb. If correct, they could solve the mystery of how enormous black holes formed so soon after the Big Bang.

A new simulation suggests little red dots, unusually compact objects seen in photos from space, might be one stage in the evolution of black holes.

A new simulation suggests little red dots, unusually compact objects seen in photos from space, might be one stage in the evolution of black holes.

Researchers have found that if black holes have certain features, known as "hair," then we could prove it by observing the gravitational ringdown of merging black holes. Future studies could test the no-hair theorem of general relativity.

Astronomers have discovered that winds from a supermassive black hole are about 100 times more powerful than previously thought. XRISM observations showed the resulting turbulence spreading roughly 300,000 light-years, extending far beyond the black hole’s host galaxy. The energy involved rivals several billion supernova explosions, revealing just how dramatically black holes can influence the space around them.

Astronomers have found that a nearby galaxy's black hole is blasting out a far more powerful and hidden gas outflow than previously realized. Studying NGC 1068, a well-known galaxy with an actively feeding black hole at its center, researchers combined new infrared observations with existing data to map how the black hole's energy is reshaping the surrounding gas. The results are reported in a paper published Aug. 6 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A new study of nine nearby galaxies has shown that actively growing supermassive black holes may contribute to, rather than prevent, star formation in their host galaxies.

The James Webb Space Telescope spots mysterious “little red dots” everywhere. A bold new theory suggests they’re suns dozens of times larger than our entire solar system. The post Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope’s ‘Little Red Dots.’ first appeared on Quanta Magazine