Articles about 'black hole'

The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.

Gravitational waves data held clues for high-mass black holes’ violent beginnings.

Scientists have spotted a massive black hole in the early universe that is ‘napping’ after stuffing itself with too much food.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars.

An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has used the James Webb Space Telescope to find evidence for an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the Universe was only 740 million years old. This marks the most distant detection of a black hole merger ever obtained and the first time that this phenomenon has been detected so early in the Universe.

Researchers have discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, dating from the dawn of the universe, and found that it is ‘eating’ its host galaxy to death.

Astronomers have made a record-breaking measurement of a black hole’s spin, one of two fundamental properties of black holes. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows this black hole is spinning slower than most of its smaller cousins. This is the most massive black hole with an accurate spin measurement and gives hints about how some of the universe’s biggest black holes grow.

Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three state-of-the-art simulations to back up results from a large sky survey, researchers from the University of Cambridge have resolved a 20-year long debate on the formation of stars. 

Professor Sir Roger Penrose, Honorary Fellow and alumnus of St John’s College Cambridge and honorary doctor of the University, has jointly won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.

Material falling into a black hole casts X-rays out into space – and now astronomers have used the echoes of this radiation to map the dynamic behaviour and surroundings of a black hole itself.