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.
An early-career Western Australian astrophysicist has helped uncover a universal rule behind one of the most powerful behaviors in the universe: when black holes launch jets. The discovery, published in the journal Nature ...
Astronomy
Sep 17, 2026
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A new study of nine nearby galaxies has shown that actively growing supermassive black holes may contribute to, rather than prevent, star formation in their host galaxies.
Astronomy
Sep 14, 2026
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It is thought the sun may have engulfed a super-Earth-sized planet early in its history. Now, a new study has gone a step further, suggesting that such an event may have left behind detectable clues inside the sun that could ...
Planetary Sciences
Sep 10, 2026
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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
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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
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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
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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
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