All articles tagged with #black hole
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a breathtaking image of Messier 77 (the Squid Galaxy), highlighting a bright core and radiating light beams. The glow is powered by gas heated by a central black hole; some rays are optical artifacts of the telescope. M77 sits about 47 million light-years away in Cetus and has a magnitude around 9.6, making it visible with modest telescopes.
Astronomers directly measured the instantaneous power of jets from the Cygnus X-1 black hole binary—nearly 10,000 suns—while jets travel at about 0.5c and bend under the donor star’s wind, based on 18 years of high-resolution radio observations; the real-time jet-power measurement improves understanding of black-hole feedback and its influence on galaxy-scale environments.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has released a sharp infrared image of Messier 77, a spiral galaxy 45 million light-years away, exposing its ultra-bright core powered by an actively feeding supermassive black hole (~8 million solar masses). Infrared light penetrates dust, letting Webb reveal how gas and dust are drawn in and heated to extreme temperatures as they spiral toward the event horizon, demonstrating Webb's transformative ability to study active galactic nuclei.
Astronomers propose that the rare, fast-evolving blue explosions called Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients (LFBOTs) arise when a compact stellar remnant—such as a black hole or neutron star—merges with the helium core of a Wolf-Rayet star. The Wolf-Rayet merger model neatly explains LFBOTs’ blue hue, dense circumstellar environments, and offsets from birth sites better than tidal disruption or standard supernova scenarios. With the Rubin Observatory’s LSST expected to uncover more LFBOTs at greater distances, scientists hope to test this channel and learn how these progenitors evolve over cosmic time.
Astronomers find a quasar ULAS J1120+0641 with an ultra-massive black hole whose gravity may disrupt its host galaxy, implying black holes could outpace galaxy growth in the early universe and challenging standard co-evolution theories.
Astronomers using JWST have found ULAS J1120+0641, an early-universe quasar whose supermassive black hole outstrips its host galaxy, leaving the system unbalanced and unlikely to be corrected by future mergers.
A growing group of physicists argues the universe may have arisen from a rebound inside a black hole rather than a traditional Big Bang. The Black Hole Universe theory suggests matter compressed to quantum limits hits a wall inside a black hole and bounces outward, potentially spawning new universes. Proponents trace the idea to Raj Kumar Pathria (1970s) and cite renewed interest from researchers like Juliano Cesar Silva Neves, with James Webb Space Telescope data cited as hinting at spin-direction imbalances in ancient galaxies that could signal a birth from a rotating black hole.
Astronomers observe a reborn supermassive black hole in galaxy J1007+3540 unleashing a colossal jet eruption—described as a cosmic volcano—that interacts with hot cluster gas to reshape jets and lobes across nearly a million light-years, highlighting episodic AGN activity and implications for galaxy evolution.
A new analysis of Cygnus X-1 using a global network of telescopes quantifies its jets, showing they travel at about half the speed of light and carry roughly 10% of the energy from infalling matter, emitting power equal to 10,000 Suns.
Astronomers mapped Cygnus X-1’s energetic jets by tracking their wobble caused by winds from its stellar companion, revealing jets carrying energy equivalent to about 10,000 suns and shooting outward at roughly half the speed of light; the measurement helps anchor black hole jet physics and improves understanding of how these outflows influence galaxy evolution.
Astronomers using NASA’s TESS space telescope captured the earliest optical rise of a black hole outburst in AT 2019wey, pinpointing the onset to late November 2019 and showing the eruption begins near the black hole before brightening the outer disk. The continuous 27-day monitoring allowed an unprecedented precise timing, supporting an inside-out outburst scenario and helping constrain the trigger mechanisms, with the event remaining bright for years and underscoring the value of wide-field missions for catching eruptions at birth; the findings appear in Research Notes of the AAS.
Astronomers tracked galaxy J0218−0036 (about 10 billion light-years away) and found its central supermassive black hole dimmed by about 20x overall and ~50x in the active nucleus from the early 2000s to 2023. Dust obscuration was ruled out, pointing to an intrinsic drop in accretion with the Eddington ratio falling from ~0.4 to ~0.008. The observed e-folding timescale is roughly 2,000 days in the observed frame (~700 days rest frame), far faster than standard models predict, suggesting a change in accretion mode and challenging current black hole growth theories.
Astronomers have observed a newborn black hole from GW190412 speeding away from its birth site at about 112,000 mph (50 km/s). Using the event’s richer waveform, including higher-order modes, researchers reconstructed both the speed and the escape direction, providing a complete recoil portrait from a single merger. The result confirms that gravitational-wave–driven kicks can eject remnants from their birth environments, such as globular clusters, and shows how the remnant’s motion might influence any light produced as it plows through surrounding gas. Future detections of asymmetric mergers with identifiable higher-order modes will help map remnant motions across environments.
Astronomers are using the expanded Event Horizon Telescope to capture frequent images of the supermassive black hole in M87—every 3–4 days from March through April—to assemble a time-lapse video of its motion and dynamics, potentially revealing its spin, how it feeds, and the behavior of its jets. Eleven of the twelve telescopes will participate (the South Pole telescope cannot see M87), and petabytes of data must be processed before the video can be constructed, while Sagittarius A* may be too restless for reliable imaging.
Astronomers using China’s Einstein Probe spotted an extreme X-ray outburst (EP250702a) in a distant galaxy that models as an intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart a white dwarf, a finding supported by HKU simulations and follow-up observations. The event’s unusual timing and rapid evolution provide what researchers call the first direct evidence of this feeding process and could help uncover the long-m missing population of intermediate-mass black holes, with implications for multi-messenger astronomy.