Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and more. Astronomers have discovered the most massive known stellar black hole in the Milky Way galaxy after detecting an unusual wobble in space. The so-called ‘sleeping giant’, called Gaia BH3, has a mass almost 33 times… Read More »
A black hole illustration with two black holes within one. Black holes are monstrous and monolithic regions of space and time that have captured the imagination of humanity. Some are created by the death and collapse of a massive star – and yet no star can produce the most enormous black holes. These are the… Read More »
Astronomers have captured the first image of polarized light and the magnetic fields surrounding Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milly Way. The historic observation made with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has revealed that the neatly arranged magnetic fields resemble those around the supermassive black hole at… Read More »
Astronomers have discovered one of the most powerful black hole eruptions ever – and this immense explosion, which took place almost 4 billion years ago, formed a pattern of stars in clusters that resemble jewelry. The star chain adorns a huge cluster of hundreds of galaxies called SDSS J1531; this body is located about 3.8… Read More »
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered an ‘extremely red’ supermassive black hole growing in the shadowy early universe. The red hue of the supermassive black hole, seen as it appeared about 700 million years after the Big Bang, is the result of the expanding universe. As the universe moves outward in… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and more. Astronomers have discovered the brightest known object in the universe, and it’s a quasar powered by the fastest-growing black hole ever measured, a new study shows. Initially classified as a star, the quasar managed to… Read More »
A newly discovered quasar is a real record breaker. It is not only the brightest quasar ever seen, but also the brightest astronomical object ever seen. It’s also powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen – a hole that consumes the equivalent of more than one solar mass per day. The quasar,… Read More »
The supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy spins so fast that it warps spacetime into an oval shape reminiscent of an American football (or a rugby ball for any non-American readers!). The finding comes from a careful study of radio and X-ray observations. According to Albert Einstein‘S theory of general relativityWhen a… Read More »
“Which came first: the galaxy or its monstrous black hole?” Technically, it’s an even older riddle than the chicken or the egg, even though we only became aware of it relatively recently. And according to new research, scientists may finally have an answer. It has long been believed that supermassive black holes that existed close… Read More »
Scientists may have found evidence that black vampire holes that feed on their victim stars – so-called microquasars – are the cosmic particle accelerators responsible for mysterious high-energy cosmic rays we see bombarding Earth. These stellar-mass black holes exist in binary systems with a supergiant star from which they greedily strip material. Some of that… Read More »