Accretion as a research area investigates the physical processes by which diffuse material gravitationally aggregates to form larger astrophysical structures, including planets, stars, black holes, and galaxies. It encompasses the study of accretion disks, angular momentum transport, magnetohydrodynamic instabilities, radiative transfer, and the interplay between accretion flows and outflows or jets. This field integrates analytical theory, numerical simulations, and multiwavelength observations to quantify mass accretion rates, efficiency of gravitational energy conversion into radiation, and feedback on the surrounding medium, thereby constraining models of structure formation, compact object growth, and high-energy phenomena in various cosmic environments.
Astronomers have found the first direct evidence that a wandering black hole can feed itself by dragging gas along in its wake as it moves through its galaxy. It's the first direct evidence of an accretion channel long predicted ...
Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole. The few that don't have had theirs ejected during a galactic collision. That's because galaxies and their black holes have formed hand in hand. There is still some debate ...
Astronomy
Sep 8, 2026
0
36
In 1974, Stephen Hawking made a prediction that transformed our understanding of black holes. Black holes, he showed, are not truly black: They slowly lose energy through a quantum process now known as Hawking radiation. ...
By combining roughly two decades of observations from NASA's Swift X-ray Telescope with radio monitoring, astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Perseus Cluster suddenly flaring in X-rays, and ...
In dark skies at night, distant starlight twinkles and speaks to vast cosmic histories almost as old as time itself. New data from instruments such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope are helping astrophysicists probe deep ...
Astronomy
Aug 27, 2026
0
33
Planets form from disks of gas and dust around young stars, but the gas needed for growth does not last forever. New observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now offer a new view of how this gas escapes ...
Astronomy
Aug 25, 2026
0
112
At the center of most galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, with a mass millions to billions of times that of our sun and some of the most extreme gravity in the universe.
Astronomy
Aug 21, 2026
0
46
A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra's research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like ...
Astronomy
Aug 13, 2026
0
55
More than 70% of massive stars are born in close binary systems, where gravitational tugs and mass transfer between companions dramatically alter their evolution. Yet once the interaction ends—whether through mass transfer, ...
Astronomy
Aug 12, 2026
0
11
For more than two decades, the quasar PHL 1811 has been considered the prototype of a rare class of "intrinsically X-ray weak" quasars, thought to produce unusually little X-ray radiation. But in 2024, the Einstein Probe ...
