Astronomy, features and articles | Educational Science

Jun 2, 2023

Stephen Hawking's most famous prediction could mean that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate, new study says

Stephen Hawking's most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate. In 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes eventually evaporate by losing what's now known as Hawking radiation — a gradual draining of...

Jun 3, 2023

Hundreds of ancient, invisible structures discovered near our galaxy's center

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of strange, stringlike structures at the center of our galaxy, possibly tracing the violent path of an ancient black hole eruption. According to new research published June 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, each of these previously unknown filaments measures between 5 and 10 light-years in...

Jun 7, 2023

Dying stars build humongous 'cocoons' that shake the fabric of space-time

Since the first direct detection of the space-time ripples known as gravitational waves was announced in 2016, astronomers regularly listen for the ringing of black holes across the universe. Projects like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (better known as LIGO) have detected almost 100 collisions between black holes (and sometimes...

Jun 8, 2023

Flare of light brighter than a trillion suns reveals location of rare double black hole galaxy

Mysterious flares in the sky brighter than a trillion suns are actually the glow from two distant black holes circling one another, astronomers confirmed in new observations that solve a decades-old mystery. New research finds that galaxy OJ 287, which sits 5 billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation...

Jun 29, 2023

The universe is rippling with a faint 'gravitational wave background' created by colliding black holes, huge international study suggests

On June 29, five independent teams of radio astronomers published a series of papers presenting evidence that the universe is filled with gravitational waves created by colliding supermassive black holes. The North American, European, Indian, Chinese and Australian teams monitored rapidly spinning dead stars known as pulsars to gather information...

Jun 30, 2023

Strange 'echo' from the Milky Way's central black hole reveals it briefly awoke 200 years ago

A mysterious echo from the center of our galaxy's supermassive black hole has revealed that, some 200 years ago, the sleeping monster briefly woke up. Located 26,000 light-years away, the black hole, called Sagittarius A*, is a gargantuan tear in space-time that is 4 million times the mass of the...

Jul 6, 2023

Gargantuan black hole 'switches on,' becoming one of the brightest objects ever seen

Scientists scouring the cosmos for signs of a rare explosion may have stumbled upon something even more remarkable: a gargantuan black hole switching on in the early universe, going from dim to tremendously bright in a cosmic blink of an eye. The black hole, dubbed J221951, is estimated to sit...

Jul 7, 2023

Time moved '5 times slower' in the early universe, mind-bending black hole study reveals

Astronomers have peered back to the dawn of the cosmos to observe time ticking five times more slowly in the early universe than it does now — finally proving a prediction that Albert Einstein made more than a century ago. Researchers spotted the extreme slow-motion effect in data taken from...

Jul 10, 2023

James Webb telescope discovers the oldest active black hole in the known universe

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have detected the most distant, actively-feeding supermassive black hole ever observed. The black hole also happens to be one of the least massive seen in the early universe — measuring the equivalent of about 9 million suns — which is proving challenging...

Jul 29, 2023

Supermassive black hole found spitting a giant, high-energy jet toward Earth

A NASA mission has observed a supermassive black hole pointing its highly energetic jet straight toward Earth. Don't panic just yet, though. As fearsome as this cosmic event is, it's located at a very safe distance of about 400 million light-years away. Actively feeding supermassive black holes, including the one...

Aug 4, 2023

Star-size black hole is emitting radio signals that scientists can't explain

Astronomers have spotted mysterious changes in a jet of highly magnetic plasma blasted out by a small black hole that is gorging on gas and dust. The feature takes the form of periodic changes in the jet occurring within a fraction of a second that have been detected by the Five-hundred-meter...

Aug 6, 2023

Could a black hole devour the universe?

Black holes are infamous for their immense gravity — they can swallow stars, planets and even other black holes. But could a black hole consume the entire universe, piece by piece? In short, no. There's no way that a black hole could eat the universe, or even an entire galaxy,...

Aug 18, 2023

Black hole 'seeds' discovered in the early universe for 1st time ever

Astronomers may have discovered the first evidence of heavy black hole seeds in the early universe. These so-called seeds could help explain how some supermassive black holes with masses equivalent to millions, or even billions, times that of the sun could have grown quickly enough to exist less than 1...

Aug 26, 2023

A black hole 'assassin' ripped a star to shreds and left its guts strewn about the galaxy

In a way, stars are like doughnuts: You have to rip them apart to see what's inside. Luckily for astronomers, sometimes the cosmos does just that — when a black hole shreds a star that passes by too closely in a violent spectacle called a tidal disruption event (TDE). (The...

Sep 1, 2023

'Twisty' new theory of gravity says information can escape black holes after all

In astrophysics, there's a saying that black holes have no hair. This means that, in the theory of general relativity, black holes are exceptionally simplistic objects. All you need to describe a black hole is its mass, its electric charge and its spin rate. With those three numbers alone, you...