Black holes as a research area encompass the theoretical, observational, and computational study of regions of spacetime where gravity is so intense that no matter or radiation can escape beyond the event horizon. This field investigates black hole formation, stability, and classification (stellar-mass, intermediate-mass, and supermassive), their thermodynamics, accretion physics, jet launching, and role in galaxy evolution. It also includes tests of general relativity in the strong-field regime, gravitational-wave signatures from black hole mergers, numerical relativity simulations, and horizon-scale imaging, integrating methods from relativistic astrophysics, high-energy physics, and computational modeling.
Two black holes can collide and merge into one. But could the opposite happen: could a single black hole split into two smaller ones? That question is explored in a new theoretical study: "When Black Holes Admit Pair-of-pants ...
Astronomy
Oct 23, 2026
3
178
A University of Missouri astronomer is leading a team of 130 researchers from 62 institutions—including NASA, the California Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Harvard University—on an ambitious mission to ...
Astronomy
Oct 16, 2026
2
227
Every black hole hides a question at its center. Einstein's theory predicts that whatever falls in is crushed into a singularity, a point of infinite density where the theory itself breaks down. Most physicists expect quantum ...
Black holes, despite their extreme nature, are described by surprisingly few basic parameters: their mass, charge and spin. Two black holes may have formed for completely different reasons and passed through very different ...
Strike a bell, and it rings with a pitch and a fading that tell you about the bell: its size, its shape, the metal it is made of. Black holes ring too. When two merge, the newborn black hole shivers and sheds gravitational ...
Physicists at UC Santa Barbara have extended the search for evidence of microscopic black holes produced at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The formation of these ...
General Physics
Sep 18, 2026
5
257
Dark matter is one of the oldest open problems in physics. It makes up most of the matter in the universe and shapes how galaxies form and move, yet no one has ever directly detected it. Physicists have proposed dozens of ...
General Physics
Sep 17, 2026
1
65
When two black holes crash together and merge, the newly formed black hole rings like a bell, sending out gravitational waves with specific frequencies that fade over time. This brief, fading pattern of waves is called ringdown, ...
Astronomy
Sep 7, 2026
1
187
So far, almost all stellar-mass black holes detected by astronomers have been found in binary systems. However, astronomers have long suspected that these binary black holes are the exception and that, within the Milky Way, ...
A team of researchers has discovered that winds generated by supermassive black holes are 100 times more powerful than previously thought, carrying energy across distances of approximately 300,000 light-years. The discovery ...
Astronomy
Jul 29, 2026
0
182
