Black Hole | featured news

Using NASA's Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, scientists were able to detect the light of the earliest stars, which are now long since gone... One of the primary goals of the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope is to measure the starlight in the universe and use that to figure out how much light has ever shone in it. Yesterday, astronomers on Fermi’s research team announced that they have reached that goal.

For years, astronomers have known about the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, but these pictures from NASA's NuSTAR telescope show a rare view of the usually sleeping giant gobbling down a cosmic snack.

NASA is poised to launch its latest X-ray space telescope on a two-year hunt for hard-to-see objects lurking in the heart of the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Some people seem born under an unlucky star. But some stars are equally unlucky themselves. Astronomers have spotted a star in another galaxy plunging toward a giant black hole and being ripped to shreds, sparking a flare so brilliant that observers detected it from a distance of 2.1 billion light-years.

Don’t get too close. Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought. Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to the fates of the violent quasars, almost supernaturally powerful explosions in the hearts of young galaxies, that dominated the early years of the universe.

For the first time, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope were able to directly observe the matter spiraling in to a black hole.

Cosmologists Alan Coley from Canada's Dalhousie University and Bernard Carr from Queen Mary University in London, have published a paper on arXiv, where they suggest that some so-called primordial black holes might have been created in the Big Crunch that came before the Big Bang.

Aliens could conceivably live on planets illuminated by the swirling mass of photons orbiting the singularity of a special type of black hole, according to a new theory.

An international team of scientists has observed four super-massive black holes at the center of galaxies, which may provide new information on how these central black hole systems operate.

After a year's delay, scientists at the world's biggest accelerator have restarted an experiment to recreate "Big Bang" conditions that had sparked suggestions the earth would be sucked in by millions of black holes.