Black Holes

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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

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*.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Since their discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, little red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these extremely distant, compact red sources has been a puzzling scientific endeavor.

Giant black holes adrift in deep space are normally invisible—unless they’re dining on stars

A team of researchers has discovered that winds generated by supermassive black holes are 100 times more powerful than previously thought, carrying energy across distances of approximately 300,000 light-years. The discovery demonstrates that these explosive winds affect the vast expanse of space beyond the galaxies they inhabit.

Astronomers have spotted the blisteringly hot exhaust fumes of the earliest quasars, intensely bright cosmic titans powered by feeding supermassive black holes.

What happens when a black hole and a star meet in the middle of nowhere in a galaxy? It sounds like it could be a dramatic science fiction backdrop, with some hapless starship caught in the crunch. Actually, such encounters in real life are pretty rare. They happen maybe once every 100,000 years. But, when they occur, the immense gravity of the supermassive black hole tears the star apart. It's an eerie-looking process. The star gets "spaghettified" — that is, pulled on one side by the black hole. That rips out a stream of gas from the star which eventually forms a disk around the black hole.

NASA’s Swift Observatory observed a supermassive black hole ripping apart a star more than 30,000 light-years from the center of a distant galaxy. The extraordinary flare briefly outshone its entire host galaxy in ultraviolet light and revealed a black hole about a million times the Sun’s mass.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers led by Université de Montréal professor Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo have captured

A team of astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has observed an extremely rare "wandering" black hole located tens of thousands of light-years from the center of its galaxy. This finding could reshape scientists' understanding of how massive black holes move through the universe after galaxies collide. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Using the Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have seen a jet from a feeding supermassive black hole churning gas surrounding a galaxy nicknamed the "red potato."

Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They are the sources of the strongest gravitational fields, allowing us to test Einstein's theory of general relativity to an extent impossible with small objects. But we are also reaching the limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So, various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai—and he recently released a paper, available as a preprint on arXiv, about what it would take to send a gram-sized probe to a nearby black hole.

A black hole merger is one of the Universe's most energetic and massive events. During such a collision, two black holes orbit closer and closer until they collide and become a much more massive black hole. The event also gives off radiation and, as it happens, gravitational waves. They help tell the story of the two objects involved in the collision.

Imagine holding one of our most precise quantum devices at a fixed position outside a black hole. A Josephson junction—two superconductors separated by an ultrathin barrier—can turn a voltage into a quantum oscillation with extraordinary precision. Would intense gravity change that quantum rule, or only change how a faraway observer reads the device?

Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They’re the sources of the strongest consistent gravitational fields, which allows us to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to an extent that’s impossible with small objects. But we’re also reaching our limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eventually send a probe directly to a black hole to observe it up close. One of the most vocal of those authors is Cosimo Bambi of Fudan University in Shanghai - and he recently released a paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, about what it would take for us to send a gram-size probe to a nearby black hole.

"It doesn't require any new technology development, which is almost unheard of for solving a LIGO instrumentation problem."

Researchers from the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with international collaborators, carried out the first spatially resolved dual-frequency spectral study of the M87 black hole using observations obtained in 2018 with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) and the Global Millimeter VLBI Array (GMVA).

Scientists have identified four types of black holes, classified mostly by their masses. But these mysterious objects continue to challenge our understanding of the universe.

Combining over 20 years of archival data from Hubble with new data from the James Webb Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has found the first of the "missing" black holes.

Physicists have discovered a surprisingly simple way to reproduce one of the most fascinating models in modern physics—linked to black holes, quantum chaos and exotic electronic materials—using ultracold atoms trapped in light.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have captured one of the clearest views yet of how an early supermassive black hole may grow within a network of young galaxies. The compact active galaxy, seen just a billion years after the Big Bang, lies beside a 12,000-parsec-long filament containing multiple galaxies that are expected to merge within a few hundred million years.

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NASA's next super telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, may leave nowhere to hide for black holes that violently murder and devour stars, not even cosmic noon.

A black hole may be stirring a "pot" of gas containing a neighboring galaxy in the early universe, according to a new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics that used observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The galaxy slowly being "cooked" is named MQN01 J004131.9-493704, but astronomers have nicknamed it the "red potato" because of its appearance in images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope.

The first-ever image of a black hole—a glowing, ring-like structure at the heart of galaxy M87—was unveiled to the world in a landmark moment in 2019. Now, researchers have taken the next big step—moving beyond capturing a picture of the black hole to understanding its physics through dual-frequency images.

Although general relativity (GR) is an elegant theory of gravity, we don't often need to use it. For most gravitational interactions, Newton's theory of universal gravitation works just fine. Newton's model is good enough to navigate spacecraft through the solar system and for most stars orbiting Sag A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

For the third time in 35 years, the black hole at the center of the galaxy IC 3599 has erupted, and this time, astronomers were watching it closely. IC 3599, a galaxy roughly 280 million light-years away, has flared this dramatically twice before, in 1990 and 2010, but both eruptions were only pieced together after they had faded. This is the first time researchers have watched one of these outbursts unfold in real time. The paper outlining its multiwavelength analysis was posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 10.

A Sun-like star orbits the supermassive black hole in our Milky Way so closely that it comes within the distance of Neptune's orbit of the Sun. It has a top speed of more than 8% of light speed. With such extreme motion the star gives astronomers the opportunity to test the limits of general relativity.

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Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have gotten a glimpse at the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves.

JWST has captured unusually detailed images of gas feeding the supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 4696. A vast filament appears to funnel material into an 800-light-year-wide spinning disk, where gas races around at up to 600 kilometers per second. The findings suggest black holes may recycle their own fuel by heating gas with jets and later drawing the cooled material back in.

When supermassive black holes (SMBH) in a certain mass range eat a star, they first tear it apart in a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE). By detecting TDE across cosmic time, astronomers can chart the growth of SMBH as the Universe aged. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help, by finding about 100 TDEs every year.

"Hawking's laws of black hole mechanics provided a satisfying connection between extreme and ordinary physics and have been the paradigm for 50 years, but they have a serious limitation."

Listening to the "ringing" produced by black holes after they collide and merge could allow scientists to test Einstein's theory of general relativity under the most extreme conditions in the universe while unlocking the secrets of these mysterious objects.

Region near the "surface of no return" was previously only accessible with theoretical models The post Super-loud gravitational waves offer a new way to study black hole event horizons appeared first on Physics World.

Despite their depiction as massive monsters that simply suck in everything, including light, astronomers know black holes actually spin. And they spin really, really quickly. Determining just how quickly is key to understanding how they affect their immediate vicinity and the galaxies that surround them. A new paper by Tegan Thomas of the University of Virginia and her colleagues, available on the arXiv preprint server, has good news and bad news on that front. The bad news is that we currently can't determine how fast black holes are actually spinning. The good news is that, hopefully in the next few years, we will have a new tool that will allow us to do so.

Scientists made a breakthrough discovery about the physics of Hawking radiation by making a miniature black hole out of light in the laboratory.

Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) have detected an extraordinary burst of radio light from a rare cosmic event in which an intermediate-mass black hole tears apart a star, revealing what appears to be the off-axis afterglow of a powerful jet.

Scientists have long suspected that this star cluster was a hotspot for a certain kind of black hole. But for decades, they had been unable to spot any

The first of 10,000 missing black holes in the Omega Centauri globular cluster has been found thanks to teamwork by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.

How do black holes at the centers of galaxies form and grow over time? To answer this question, scientists need to detect and study supermassive black holes at great distances that existed much earlier in the universe's history. New research suggests NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is on track to launch Aug. 30, 2026, will be able to detect these distant, ancient black holes that existed up to 11 billion years ago.

Despite their depiction as massive monsters that simply suck in everything, including light, astronomers know black holes actually spin. And they spin really, really quickly at that. Determining just how quickly is key to understanding how they impact their immediate vicinity, but also the galaxies that surround them. A new paper by Tegan Thomas of the University of Virginia and her colleagues, available in pre-print on arXiv, has some good news and bad news on that front. The bad news is we currently can’t determine how fast black holes are actually spinning. The good news is that, hopefully in the next few years, we will have a new tool that will allow us to.

Astronomers are closer to solving the mystery of how supermassive black holes feed themselves thanks to new images from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST. The images provide the clearest view ever seen of gaseous filaments connecting a galaxy's hot atmosphere to the rotating disk of gas that feeds its central supermassive black hole.

The Euclid space telescope discovery could help researchers understand how black holes grew so massive so quickly in the early universe.

A black hole in our cosmic neighborhood is proving to be just as voracious as those that existed

The massive globular star cluster Omega Centauri has puzzled astronomers for decades. It should be filled with black holes left behind by exploding stars, yet evidence for them is scarce. Now, astronomers using archival data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and supporting observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have finally located the first stellar-mass black hole in this cluster. Discovering the first of this missing black hole population will help refine current theories on black hole formation within environments such as Omega Centauri. The team's findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Scientists have developed a new framework that could finally apply the laws of thermodynamics to real, ever-changing black holes instead of only perfectly stable ones. The advance may improve our understanding of black hole mergers, evaporation, and the powerful gravitational wave events detected by observatories like LIGO.

Since gravitational waves were first detected in 2015, instruments including LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA have picked up a steady stream of signals from colliding black holes, building a catalog that now numbers in the hundreds. Yet despite this wealth of data, a fundamental question has remained stubbornly unresolved: How do these black holes actually form?

Researchers have recreated the physics of extracting energy from a spinning black hole using a stationary device that produces synthetic ultrafast rotation. The achievement transforms a long-standing theoretical idea into a practical experiment and could inspire new advances in optics, wireless communications, and quantum science.

More than half a century ago, Sir Roger Penrose envisioned a scenario in which energy could be extracted from a black hole spinning at extreme speeds. He proposed that a particle entering its ergosphere—a region of space dragged around by a rotating black hole—could split into two. One part could fall into the black hole while the other escaped carrying more energy than the original particle. Building on this theory, physicist Yakov Zel'dovich later predicted that a wave interacting with a sufficiently fast, rotating object could extract energy from it and become amplified.

This week, researchers reported finding nanoplastics in Antarctic soils for the first time, suggesting they were delivered via long-range atmospheric transport. A study associates the use of hormonal birth control with the risk of brain tumors. And researchers developed a new drug against metastatic prostate cancer using human proteins.

The black hole at the centre of a nearby galaxy is growing exceptionally fast, and is producing a burst of radio emission that has never been observed before. With characteristics that are expected in the early Universe, this unique galaxy provides important insights into the processes that governed the growth of the first black holes.

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A feeding black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy is behaving similarly to cosmic titans that existed just after the Big Bang.

Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) have detected an extraordinary burst of radio light from a rare cosmic event in which an intermediate-mass black hole tears apart a star, revealing what appears to be the off-axis afterglow of a powerful jet. The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

When two black holes orbit each other, they eventually spiral inward and collide in one of the most violent phenomena in the universe. The event is so energetic that it significantly distorts the universe around it. It emits gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime—that are strong enough to be detected with precision instruments on Earth even when they originate billions of light-years away.

Astronomers studying a population of unusually X-ray-silent and overmassive black holes discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope have found that they may not be as massive as they appear. The new paper, outlining a plausible scenario that would produce such black holes, was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on June 19.

Author(s): Monica Rincon-Ramirez, Nathan K. Johnson-McDaniel, Eugenio Bianchi, Ish Gupta, Vaishak Prasad, and B. S. SathyaprakashThe remnant properties of black hole mergers may be governed by a maximum entropy bound suggesting that once the black holes become sufficiently close together, the throat around both black holes resembles that of an individual Kerr black hole to a far-away observer, and thus the Kerr entropy computation becomes valid. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 137, 021406] Published Tue Jul 07, 2026