Black Holes Archives

May 26, 2023May 26, 2023 by Brian Koberlein

When Black Holes Merge, They'll Ring Like a Bell

Artist view of a black hole ringing down into a stable state. Credit: Yasmine Steele at University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign

When two black holes collide, they don’t smash into each other the way two stars might. A black hole is an intensely curved region of space that can be described by only its mass, rotation, and electric charge, so two black holes release violent gravitational ripples as merge into a single black hole. The new black hole continues to emit gravitational waves until it settles down into a simple rotating black hole. That settling down period is known as the ring down, and its pattern holds clues to some of the deepest mysteries of gravitational physics.

May 23, 2023May 23, 2023 by Evan Gough

Where Are the Missing Black Holes? The Hubble May Have Helped Find One

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows the globular cluster Messier 4. It contains several hundre thousand stars, and its center might host an elusive intermediate-mass black hole. The black hole could have 800 solar masses. Image Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Most black holes are stellar mass black holes. They’re created when a star several times more massive than our Sun reaches the end and collapses in on itself. There are also supermassive black holes (SMBH,) the behemoths at the center of galaxies that can boast billions of times more mass than the Sun.

But where are the intermediate-mass black holes?

May 16, 2023May 16, 2023 by Matt Williams

Galactic Black Hole Winds Blow Up to a Third the Speed of Light. The Impact on Their Galaxies is Impressive.

An artist’s impression of what the dust around a quasar might look like from a light year away. Credit Peter Z. Harrington

They are known as ultra-fast outflows (UFOs), powerful space winds emitted by the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) – aka. “quasars.” These winds (with a fun name!) move close to the speed of light (relativistic speeds) and regulate the behavior of SMBHs during their active phase. These gas emissions are believed to fuel the process of star formation in galaxies but are not yet well understood. Astronomers are interested in learning more about them to improve our understanding of what governs galactic evolution.

This is the purpose of the SUper massive Black hole Winds in the x-rAYS (SUBWAYS) project, an international research effort dedicated to studying quasars using the ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope. The first results of this project were shared by a group of scholars led by the University of Bologna and the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy. In the paper that describes their findings, the team presented X-ray spectroscopic data to characterize the properties of UFOs in 22 luminous galaxies.

May 14, 2023May 12, 2023 by Paul M. Sutter

Black Holes Might be Defects in Spacetime

Artist view of a binary black hole system. Credit: LIGO/Caltech/MIT/Sonoma State (Aurore Simonnet)

A team of theoretical physicists have discovered a strange structure in space-time that to an outside observer would look exactly like a black hole, but upon closer inspection would be anything but: they would be defects in the very fabric of the universe.

May 11, 2023May 11, 2023 by Evan Gough

Advanced Life Should Have Already Peaked Billions of Years Ago

The Drake Equation, a mathematical formula for the probability of finding life or advanced civilizations in the universe. Credit: University of Rochester

Did humanity miss the party? Are SETI, the Drake Equation, and the Fermi Paradox all just artifacts of our ignorance about Advanced Life in the Universe? And if we are wrong, how would we know?

A new study focusing on black holes and their powerful effect on star formation suggests that we, as advanced life, might be relics from a bygone age in the Universe.

May 3, 2023May 3, 2023 by Brian Koberlein

Black Hole Event Horizons Can Get So Big it'll Boggle Your Imagination

An artist’s impression of an accretion disk rotating around an unseen supermassive black hole. Credit: Mark A. Garlick/Simons Foundation

In honor of Black Hole Week, NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio has released an amazing video showing how several supermassive black holes scale with our solar system. It’s definitely worth checking out because it’s an excellent example of just how overwhelmingly huge some black holes are.

NASA Animation Sizes Up the Biggest Black Holes

May 2, 2023May 2, 2023 by Nancy Atkinson

Gaze at a Nearby Actively Feeding Supermassive Black Hole

This Hubble image shows the central region of NGC 4395. The image uses data from Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. Credits: NASA, ESA, S. Larsen (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen) and E. Sabbi (STScI); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

Astronomers recently shared a new image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of the galaxy NGC 4395. This relatively diffuse and dim dwarf galaxy is located just 14 million light-years from Earth.

NGC 4395 has several oddities, and this new image zooms in on the galaxy’s central region to highlight just one of those quirks. NGC 4395 is different from other dwarf galaxies because it contains an actively feeding supermassive black hole at its center.

But this black hole is considered one of the lowest mass supermassive holes ever detected, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

April 30, 2023April 30, 2023 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

A Black Hole Tore a Star to Pieces. The Closest We’ve Ever Seen.

This artist's illustration depicts what astronomers call a "tidal disruption event," or TDE, when an object such as a star wanders too close to a black hole and is destroyed by tidal forces generated from the black hole's intense gravitational forces. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss.

We all know that black holes are destructive monsters. Their tremendous gravitational pull sucks in anything that gets in the way. This is particularly true for supermassive black holes in the hearts of galaxies. They can tear apart stars. And, every so often—like once every, 10,000 years, that happens. The star passes too close and the black hole’s gravity shreds it.

April 29, 2023April 29, 2023 by Brian Koberlein

These Stars are Already Merging, but Their Future Will Be Catastrophic

Artist's view of the contact binary that will eventually merge as black holes. Credit: UCL / J. daSilva

Close-orbiting binaries are a ticking time bomb. Over time they spiral ever closer to each other until they merge in a cataclysmic explosion such as a supernova. But in the middle of their story, things can get interesting. Some stars collapse into a white dwarf before merging with their partner, others edge so close to each other that their surfaces touch for a time, becoming contact binaries before finally colliding. But one newly discovered binary system will have a wild ride before its final demise.

April 27, 2023April 27, 2023 by Carolyn Collins Petersen

A Supermassive Black Hole and its Jet, All in a Single Picture

Here's the jet and shadow of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy shown together for the first time. The observations were obtained with telescopes from the Global Millimetre VLBI Array (GMVA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which ESO is a partner, and the Greenland Telescope. Credit: R.-S. Lu (SHAO), E. Ros (MPIfR), S. Dagnello (NRAO/AUI/NSF) — This image shows the jet and shadow of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy together for the first time. The observations were obtained with a set of three radio telescopes. Courtesy ESO.

In May 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team released the first-ever radio image of M87’s central black hole. It was a stunning revelation based on observations made using a worldwide array of radio telescopes. Recently, they re-released a newer, sharper image of the black hole’s “ring of light.”