Black hole

The cosmic beauty of space never ceases to impress. New Atlas rounds up some of the most incredible space photos of 2019, including historic firsts, stunning starscapes, gorgeous galaxies and some new angles on our own solar system.

Astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and at the University Observatory Munich have found the largest black hole using direct mass measurements so far. It has a mass 40 billion times that of the Sun.

Black holes are mysterious objects: just when we think we understand how big they can get, we go and find new ones that bend the rules. Now, astronomers have found a stellar black hole in our galaxy that’s so big it defies explanation.

Every planet we know of orbits a star – but that might not be a universal rule. According to calculations by researchers at NAOJ, planets could technically form around supermassive black holes, creating vast planetary systems of thousands of worlds.

Black holes come in a few different sizes, from modest ones a few times heftier than the Sun, right up to supermassive monsters at the heart of galaxies. But now researchers claim to have discovered the smallest black hole ever detected.

Wormholes are a sci-fi staple – but could they be science fact? Surprisingly they fit into current physics models, although no evidence has ever been found. Now, researchers have outlined how we might go about looking for wormholes in our own galaxy.

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy with strange clouds orbiting its supermassive black hole. Rather than all circling in the same direction, NGC 1068 has two rings that orbit in opposite directions – and that may answer a long-standing mystery.

By training a pair of instruments on a nearby black hole, a team of astronomers have now produced a high-frame rate visualization of violent flares at its center in the kind of detail never seen before.

Nowadays, the Milky Way is a pretty quiet galaxy – but just a few million years ago its central black hole sent off huge flares of radiation.

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has observed a gigantic black hole ripping apart a star in a distant galaxy.

This intriguing NASA visualization shows how the powerful gravitational influence of a black hole dramatically warps the light emitted from material spiraling towards its event horizon.

Astronomers have spotted an event that was thought to happen over millennia play out in a matter of months, as a usually-quiet galaxy suddenly fired up into an energetic quasar – and not just once, but in six different cases.