Black Holes Archives

September 12, 2019September 12, 2019 by Evan Gough

Astronomers Find a Supermassive Black Hole That’s Feasting on a Regular Schedule, Every 9 Hours

The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy GSN 069 has a unique, regular feeding schedule. Every 9 hours it flares with x-rays as it consumes matter. Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXO/CSIC-INTA/G.Miniutti et al.; Optical: DSS.

Astronomers have found a supermassive black hole (SMBH) with an unusually regular feeding schedule. The behemoth is an active galactic nucleus (AGN) at the heart of the Seyfert 2 galaxy GSN 069. The AGN is about 250 million light years from Earth, and contains about 400,000 times the mass of the Sun.

August 13, 2019August 13, 2019 by Evan Gough

Milky Way’s Black Hole Just Flared, Growing 75 Times as Bright for a Few Hours

Illustration of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF — Illustration of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It's huge, with over 4 times the mass of the Sun. But ultramassive black holes are even more massive and can contain billions of solar masses. Image Credit: Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF

Even though the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is a monster, it’s still rather quiet. Called Sagittarius A*, it’s about 4.6 million times more massive than our Sun. Usually, it’s a brooding behemoth. But scientists observing Sgr. A* with the Keck Telescope just watched as its brightness bloomed to over 75 times normal for a few hours.

August 10, 2019August 10, 2019 by Evan Gough

A Monster Black Hole has been Found with 40 Billion Times the Mass of the Sun

A composite image of the Abell 85 galaxy cluster. The purple is multi-million degree gas detected in X-rays by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the other colors show galaxies in an optical image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Image Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/SAO/A.Vikhlinin et al.); Optical (SDSS); Illustration (MPE/V.Springel)

If contemplating the vast size of astronomical objects makes you feel rather puny and insignificant, then this new discovery will make you feel positively infinitesimal.

It’s almost impossible to imagine an object this large: a super massive black hole that’s 40 billion times more massive than our Sun. But there it is, sitting in the center of a super-giant elliptical galaxy called Holmberg 15A. Holmberg 15A is about 700 million light years away, in the center of the Abell 85 galaxy cluster.

July 15, 2019July 15, 2019 by Matt Williams

Hubble Spots “Impossible” Debris Disk Around a Black Hole

The Hubble Space Telescope is like an old dog that is constantly teaching the astronomical community new tricks. In the course of its almost thirty years in operation, it has revealed vital data about the expansion of the Universe, its age, the Milky Way, supermassive black holes (SMBHs), other star systems and exoplanets, and the planets of the Solar System.

Most recently, an international team of researchers using Hubble made a discovery that was not only fascinating but entirely unexpected. In the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, they spotted a swirling thin disk of gas that was precariously close to a back hole that is about 250 million Solar masses. The find was a complete surprise since the black hole was considered too small to have such a structure around it.

June 29, 2019June 29, 2019 by Evan Gough

Astronomers See Evidence of Supermassive Black Holes Forming Directly in the Early Universe

An illustration of a Super-Massive Black Hole. Image Credit: Scott Woods, Western University

Super-Massive Black Holes (SMBH) are hard to explain. These gargantuan singularities are thought to be at the center of every large galaxy (our Milky Way has one) but their presence there sometimes defies easy explanation. As far as we know, black holes form when giant stars collapse. But that explanation doesn’t fit all the evidence.

June 8, 2019January 26, 2021 by Matt Williams

Black Hole Simulation Solves a Mystery About Their Accretion Disks

Credit: ESA/Hubble, ESO, M. Kornmesser — Researchers at WSU have created a fluid with a negative effective mass for the first time, which could open the door to studying the deeper mysteries of the Universe. Credit: ESA/Hubble, ESO, M. Kornmesse

Black holes are one of the most awesome and mysterious forces in the Universe. Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, these points in spacetime are formed when massive stars undergo gravitational collapse at the end of their lives. Despite decades of study and observation, there is still much we don’t know about this phenomenon.

For example, scientists are still largely in the dark about how the matter that falls into orbit around a black hole and is gradually fed onto it (accretion disks) behave. Thanks to a recent study, where an international team of researchers conducted the most detailed simulations of a black hole to date, a number of theoretical predictions regarding accretion disks have finally been validated.

June 6, 2019June 6, 2019 by Evan Gough

There’s a Ring of Cool Gas Wrapped Around the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

Scientists using ALMA have for the first time captured an image of the cool gas near the black hole in the Milky Way. Image Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF; S. Dagnello

There’s a lot going on at the center of our galaxy. A supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A-Star resides there, drawing material in with its inexorable gravitational attraction. In that mind-bending neighbourhood, where the laws of physics are stretched beyond comprehension, astronomers have detected a ring of cool gas.

May 17, 2019May 17, 2019 by Paul M. Sutter

Is Dark Matter Made of Axions? Black Holes May Reveal the Answer

The early universe. Credit: Tom Abel & Ralf Kaehler (KIPACSLAC)/ AMNH/NASA

What is dark matter made of? It’s one of the most perplexing questions of modern astronomy. We know that dark matter is out there, since we can see its obvious gravitational influence on everything from galaxies to the evolution of the entire universe, but we don’t know what it is. Our best guess is that it’s some sort of weird new particle that doesn’t like to talk to normal matter very often (otherwise we would have seen it by now). One possibility is that it’s an exotic hypothetical kind of particle known as an axion, and a team of astronomers are using none other than black holes to try to get a glimpse into this strange new cosmic critter.

May 2, 2019May 5, 2019 by Evan Gough

It Looks Like LIGO/Virgo Have Detected a Black Hole Eating a Neutron Star. For the First Time Ever

A new signal detected by LIGO/Virgo may be the so-called ‘holy grail’ of astrophysics: the merger of a neutron star and a black hole. They’ve discovered pairs of black holes merging, and pairs of neutron stars merging, but until now, not a neutron star-black hole pair.

April 30, 2019April 30, 2019 by Evan Gough

Rapidly Spinning Black Hole is Spitting Out Blobs of Plasma

An artist's illustration of the black hole V404 Cygni. Image Credit: ICRAR.

Black holes, those beguiling singularities that sit on the precipice of the known and the unknown, keep surprising us with their behaviour. As organizations like the Event Horizon Telescope have made clear, there’s a lot we don’t know about the holes, and worse than that, we don’t even know how much we don’t know.

Now scientists have observed a new phenomenon that adds to the black hole mystique: a rapidly spinning black hole that ejects massive blobs of plasma.