Telescopes at the European Southern Observatory and other organizations worldwide have spied a rare blast of light originating from a star as it was being ripped apart by a supermassive black hole.
Black holes are perhaps the strangest, least-understood objects in our universe. With so much potential — being linked to everything from wormholes to new baby universes — they have sucked in physicists for decades.
Mathematical calculations and observations of Milky Way stars illuminated the hidden objects
M87*, the first black hole ever to be directly imaged, has a newly-identified feature: it glitters and wobbles, according to new research.
Astronomers have discovered six galaxies ensnared in the cosmic “spider’s web” of a supermassive black hole soon after the Big Bang, according to research published Thursday that could help explain the development of these enigmatic monsters.
In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) delivered the first resolved images of M87*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87). Those images were produced using EHT observations performed in April 2017. Additional observations were required to investigate the persistence of the primary image feature and to quantify the image variability. To address this need, astronomers analyzed M87* data collected with the proto-EHT array of telescopes in 2009, 2011, 2012, and 2013. The analysis reveals the behavior of the black hole image across this period, indicating persistence of the crescent-like shadow feature, but also variation of its orientation — the crescent appears to be wobbling.
Researchers believe noise was two black holes colliding around 7 billion years ago, creating a previously unseen class of stellar object
Astronomers using the twin LIGO detectors located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy, have detected gravitational waves from the most massive binary black hole merger ever discovered. The two spinning black holes merged when the Universe was only about 7 billion years old, which is roughly half its present age, and formed a larger black hole weighing a whopping 142 times the mass of the Sun — a so-called intermediate-mass black hole.
Spacetime ripples reveal the most massive and most distant black hole collision yet
Around five years ago, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected high-energy gamma rays coming from TXS 0128+554, an elliptical galaxy located some 500 million light-years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. Purdue University’ Professor Matthew Lister and colleagues have since taken a closer look using NSF’s Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
