black holes

Watch A Massive Black Hole Snack On A Planet

Over 47 million light years away, in a galaxy called NGC 4845, there’s one hungry black hole. In fact, scientists have watched in awe as, soon after it stirred from dormancy, it chomped away at a planet 30 times the mass of Jupiter.


NASA Puts New Spin On Black Holes

Scientists in the US have successfully used a new NASA telescope to help improve our understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve. Using data taken by the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, scientists were able to measure the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our Sun.


This Black Hole Spins At (Almost) The Speed Of Light

NASA and the ESA have teamed up to measure how fast a black hole, that weighs two million times more than our sun, spins — and the result’s mind boggling.


Scientists Might Have Captured The Birth Of A Black Hole

This stunningly trippy object is W49B, a supernova remnant 26,000 light-years away from Earth. It’s just a 1000 years old, which in cosmological terms is not even a heartbeat in the life of a human. It may also be the birth place of a newborn black hole, the youngest ever detected in the galaxy.


The Biggest Ever Black Hole Weighs 17 Billion Times More Than The Sun

Every spiral galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its centre, so they’re no big deal, right? Wrong: scientists have just discovered the biggest ever black hole, which weighs 17 billion times as much as our sun — and it throws previous thinking about the evolution of our universe into question.


Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Is Getting Angry

The black hole at the centre of our galaxy isn’t happy. In fact, it’s spitting out its biggest X-ray flares ever, which are a hundred times more powerful than anything it’s ever produced before.


Scientists Discover Millions Of Hidden Black Holes Eating Hot DOGs

Scientists have detected millions of previously hidden supermassive black holes surrounding us, some of them busily eating newly discovered “extremely bright and extremely rare” galaxies called hot DOGs (Dust-Obscured Galaxies). Astronomy is fun!


A Black Hole Devouring A Star Is One Hell Of An Amazing View

Look at this star turned into a fire dragon by a single point of nothingness with the mass of three million suns — its body twisted and deformed as a black beast 2.7 billion light-years away devours it with infinite hunger.


Cosmic Hurricane Tearing Through Our Universe

If you thought space was a peaceful vacuum, think again: scientists have discovered the fastest winds ever observed on a stellar-mass black hole, and they reach an incredible 32 million kilometres per hour.


New Type Of Black Hole May Show How Galaxies Are Formed

Intermediate black holes could tell us how galaxies are formed, as well as how black holes go from teeny tiny to being supermassive.


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