black hole mergers
Building the Black Hole Family Tree
Many of the black holes astronomers observe are the result of mergers from less massive black holes. Using gravitational waves,…
NASA is Building Telescopes for the LISA Mission
Some of the most cataclysmic and mysterious events in the cosmos only reveal themselves by their gravitational waves. We've detected…
The Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Might Have Formed 9 Billion Years Ago
Large galaxies like ours are hosts to Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs.) They can be so massive that they resist comprehension,…
Scientists Develop a Novel Method for Detecting Supermassive Black Holes: Use Smaller Black Holes!
In 1974, astronomers Bruce Balick and Robert L. Brown discovered a powerful radio source at the center of the Milky…
A Solution to the “Final Parsec Problem?”
Supermassive Black Holes are Nature's confounding behemoths. It's difficult for Earth-bound minds to comprehend their magnitude and power. Astrophysicists have…
Primordial Black Holes Can Only Explain a Fraction of Dark Matter
What is Dark Matter? That question is prominent in discussions about the nature of the Universe. There are many proposed…
Merging Black Holes Could Give Astronomers a Way to Detect Hawking Radiation
Nothing lasts forever, including black holes. Over immensely long periods of time, they evaporate, as will other large objects in…
Here’s Why We Should Put a Gravitational Wave Observatory on the Moon
Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been hungering for better detectors. But…
Black Holes Need Refreshing Cold Gas to Keep Growing
How were supermassive black holes able to grow so rapidly in the early Universe? Galactic mergers were believed to be…
Next Generation Gravitational Wave Observatories Could Detect 100-600 Solar Mass Black Hole Mergers
Humans are born wonderers. We're always wondering about the next valley over, the next horizon, what we'll understand next about…