Black hole

Astronomers have watched a supermassive black hole take two bites of a star, and predicted when it might go back for a third. If it does, this should make for an intriguing stellar light show.

Supermassive black holes have been known to belch gigantic beams of plasma into space – and now scientists have managed to recreate these fireballs in a lab at CERN.

What would it look like to fall into a black hole? It’s a question basically everyone has pondered, and now NASA has finally given us a first-person view of the experience with scientifically-accurate visualizations produced by a supercomputer.

A giant quantum vortex has been created in superfluid helium in a lab at the University of Nottingham. Its behavior was found to mimic that of black holes and may help astrophysicists gain deeper insight into these galactic gravity gobblers.

We’ve all regretted taking too long to make a move, but at least it wasn't 3 billion years. That’s how long the sexual tension has been building between two slow-dancing supermassive black holes, whose eventual congress could rock the entire universe.

The brightest object in the known universe has just been found. It's a supermassive black hole with the mass of 17 billion Suns, and it swallows another Suns’ worth of material every day, making it also the fastest-growing black hole ever found.

A supermassive monster lurks at the center of our galaxy, and astronomers have now discovered that it’s spinning so fast it’s warping the very fabric of spacetime into a football shape.

Astronomers have discovered the most distant – and therefore earliest – known black hole. Hiding in a galaxy called GN-z11, this black hole is bigger than should be possible given the age of the universe.

Astronomers have discovered a neutron star orbiting a mysterious object that, by all accounts, shouldn’t be able to exist. Seemingly invisible in light, and too small to be a black hole, the object defies explanation.

Black holes are famous for gobbling up everything – but could they ever be swallowed whole? A new study suggests stars could capture very small black holes. There might even be a way to find them, and if so, they could help us understand dark matter.

You’d never notice one star in the galaxy that wasn’t from around here. Astronomers have now found that a star right near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way likely originated in a smaller galaxy that ours devoured.

Earlier this year, it was reported that Earth was hit by the brightest gamma-ray bursts seen since the dawn of civilization. Now, a team of astronomers has assigned a value to the energy contained in those blasts and it's staggering to say the least.