Their orbit periodically takes them through a cloud of gas, triggering flares.
All the singularities of gravitational collapse are "clothed" by the event horizons of black holes – meaning we could never observe one. This is called cosmic censorship.
Using the largest gravitational wave detector ever made, we have confirmed earlier reports that the fabric of the Universe is constantly vibrating.
New findings using data from NASA's IXPE mission offer unprecedented insight into the shape and nature of a structure important to black holes called a corona.
In March 2021, astronomers observed a high-energy burst of light from a distant galaxy. Assigned the name AT 2021hdr, it was thought to be a supernova.
It appears that sometimes stars fail to explode as supernovae and instead turn directly into black holes.
If the hypothesis that black holes are related to dark energy is proven correct, it would revolutionize conventional knowledge about black holes and dark energy.
Sitting in the middle of a galaxy called LID-568, this black hole, as seen just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, appearing to guzzle down material at a jaw-dropping rate of over 40 times a theoretical maximum known as the Eddington limit.
V4641 Sagittarii is a system about 20,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers have now detected photons from V4641 Sagittarii carrying energies of up to a staggering 200 teraelectronvolts (TeV).
In this system, called V404 Cygni, the black hole is consuming a small star that is spiraling in very close and fast while a newfound third star circles the black hole from much farther away.
A fluffy cluster of stars spilling across the sky may have a secret hidden in its heart: a swarm of over 100 stellar-mass black holes.
Researchers at MIT suggest that the microscopic "primordial black holes" could be blasting through our solar system at least once a decade.
The latest discovery used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to spot three bright, visible light 'hot spots' deep inside a pair of colliding galaxies.
Although our Universe may seem stable, having existed for a whopping 13.7 billion years, several experiments suggest that it is at risk - walking on the edge of a very dangerous cliff.
Dark matter could provide supermassive black holes the brakes they need to bring them crashing together at the end of a long, spiraling journey towards their destiny.
