Physicists recreate black hole energy extraction in the lab
More than 50 years ago, physicist Sir Roger Penrose proposed a remarkable idea: under the right conditions, it might be possible to extract energy from a rapidly spinning black hole.…
Scientists expected a black hole but found a neutrino factory powered by stars
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have tracked down the source of a powerful neutrino burst with the help of a remarkable cosmic phenomenon that acted like a…
Black hole winds may be robbing giant galaxies of their future stars
Astronomers may be getting closer to solving a long-standing mystery about the universe’s largest galaxies. Observations from the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, known as XRISM, are providing new evidence…
A dying star could create a new universe instead of a black hole
Massive stars produce light and heat through nuclear fusion, a process that releases enormous amounts of energy from their cores. Eventually, however, the largest stars run out of fuel. Once…
Black hole jets measured for first time and rival the power of 10,000 suns
Researchers have taken a major step toward understanding how black holes influence the universe by directly measuring the power of their jets. Using a network of radio telescopes spread across…
The early universe supercharged black hole growth
One of astronomy’s longest standing puzzles has been understanding how black holes grew so large in such a short span of cosmic time. Scientists have long known that supermassive black…
Astronomers just watched a black hole twist spacetime
The universe has delivered a rare breakthrough for researchers chasing one of the hardest effects to catch in the night sky. In findings reported in Science Advances, scientists describe the…
Rogue black hole shocks astronomers with record radio blast
For the first time, scientists have observed a tidal disruption event (TDE) — a phenomenon in which a black hole rips apart a passing star — taking place outside the…
This tiny spacecraft could race to a black hole and rewrite physics
It sounds like science fiction: a spacecraft, no heavier than a paperclip, propelled by a laser beam and hurtling through space at the speed of light toward a black hole,…
AI Reveals Milky Way’s Black Hole Spins Near Top Speed
An international team of astronomers has trained a neural network with millions of synthetic simulations and artificial intelligence (AI) to tease out new cosmic curiosities about black holes, revealing the…