Astronomical black holes are compact astrophysical systems characterized by regions of spacetime where gravity is so strong that no matter or radiation can escape beyond the event horizon. They are described by solutions to Einstein’s field equations, typically approximated by the Kerr or Schwarzschild metrics, and are defined by mass, spin, and (negligible) charge. Formed primarily via stellar core collapse or hierarchical mergers, they interact with their environments through accretion disks, relativistic jets, and gravitational-wave emission. Astronomical black holes span stellar-mass to supermassive regimes, influencing galactic dynamics, high-energy radiation processes, and cosmological structure formation.
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. ...
Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime created when pairs of black holes spiral into each other and eventually merge. But if this ripple has been warped by another massive object on its way to Earth, a new analysis ...
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 ...
After analyzing infrared images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of researchers has discovered multiple massive black holes from approximately 12.5–12.8 billion years ago that were ...
Astronomy
Aug 31, 2026
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Welcome back to our series on Interstellar Travel, where we look at the many proposals made for sending missions to the stars since the dawn of the Space Age. In our first installment, we examined how Cold War-era developments ...
Planetary Sciences
Aug 31, 2026
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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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On Aug. 15, the CTAO LST Collaboration and the MAGIC Collaboration released findings from observations of OP 313, the most distant very-high-energy blazar ever recorded. The paper, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, presents ...
Astronomy
Aug 24, 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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A mysterious background of extremely low-frequency gravitational waves detected by networks of pulsars may carry information about events that began more than 13 billion years ago—including the formation of some of the first ...
Astronomy
Aug 19, 2026
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Astronomers have discovered the fastest known star in our galaxy, the Milky Way, orbiting the black hole at its center. The star, named S301, was detected with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer ...
Astronomy
Aug 19, 2026
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