Supermassive black hole

Astronomers have found a distant galaxy that has managed to continue making stars despite the presence of a "cold quasar" raging at its core. The discovery goes against current scientific knowledge and has prompted a rethink of how galaxies evolve.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Roger Penrose for his proof that black holes result from general relativity, and jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for discovering the supermassive monster at the center of the Milky Way.

The LIGO and Virgo Scientific Collaboration has detected gravitational waves coming from the most massive black hole collision that it's ever recorded. The end result created a gargantuan black hole that belongs to a new class.

Despite the name, black holes often shine very bright in the sky, due to their hot glowing corona. Now, astronomers have been puzzled to watch a black hole’s corona suddenly vanish – and if that wasn’t weird enough, it reappeared a few months later.

Astronomers have observed a bright flash of light from space, which appears to have come from a collision between two black holes. And that’s surprising, considering that black holes are famously dark objects.

Astronomers investigating gamma ray emissions have discovered that certain active galaxies are giving off bursts in regular patterns. This, the team says, could be an indication of galaxies harboring two supermassive black holes in their centers.

Almost 30 years of observations has revealed that a star in the center of the galaxy orbits the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* in a rosette, or spirograph shape. The find once again confirms a prediction made by Einstein’s General Relativity.

Astronomers have found evidence of the most powerful explosion in the universe. The crater of the intergalactic-scale detonation was caused by a supermassive black hole located in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster 390 million light-years from Earth.

NASA has released a new panoramic infrared image of the center of the Milky Way. With data gathered by the Boeing 747-based SOFIA observatory, the image reveals new details of certain regions that have been traditionally tricky to capture.

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.

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.

Astronomers have discovered a star known as S5-HVS1, travelling at an incredible 6 million km/h (3.7 million mph). That not only makes it the fastest known star, but it’s fast enough to fling it right out of the galaxy.