Black holes, dark matter, the edge of the universe—still-unsolved puzzles of the cosmos.
18 articles
Black holes look eternal, but physics says otherwise. Add mass and they get colder and live longer; shrink them down and they run hot, violent, and brief, ending in a burst of light. Even a sun-sized black hole would take roughly 10^67 years to fully evaporate — a span that makes the universe's 13.8-billion-year history look like nothing at all.
A black hole isn't a vacuum cleaner that sucks up everything nearby. Outside the event horizon, NASA notes, its gravity is identical to that of any ordinary star of the same mass. So if the Sun turned into a 3-km-radius black hole, Earth would just keep orbiting 150 million kilometers away, business as usual. You'd only get pulled in if you drifted right up to the horizon itself.
Black holes come in two known flavors: stellar-mass (under 100 suns) and the supermassive giants at galactic cores (millions to billions of solar masses). The range in between has stayed stubbornly hidden, until a star wandered too close to one, 450 million light-years away, and got torn apart.
At the center of the Milky Way sits a black hole with the mass of 4 million Suns. Right next door, astronomers are hunting for a dead star that blinks with millisecond precision — and if it's real, it could become the ultimate tool for testing Einstein's theory under the most extreme gravity in the galaxy.
Supermassive black holes are supposed to sit at the center of their galaxies. But astronomers just found a second one hiding about 2,600 light-years off-center in the same galaxy — roughly a tenth of the distance between the Sun and the Milky Way's core. Close to the center, but not quite there. Here's why.
The quasar J0313-1806 shows us the universe as it looked barely 670 million years after the Big Bang. At its center already sat a supermassive black hole 1.6 billion times the Sun's mass. How did it grow so fast in such a young universe? SORABUMI traces the trick behind 'looking far means looking back in time.'
Primordial black holes may have formed before the universe was even a second old. Unlike black holes born from dying stars, they could be lighter than the Sun. By 2026, gravitational-wave detectors had logged 390 events — but the one that would prove it still hasn't shown up. SORABUMI explains.
We picture black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners, but the real problem is starvation: food has to come to them. JWST peered into the central 2,000 light-years (618 parsecs) of NGC 4696 and, for the first time, caught 100-million-degree gas condensing into threads that feed a rotating disk — a self-sustaining feeding loop.
GWTC-5.0, the gravitational-wave catalog released in 2026, shows signs that some merged black holes went on to collide again, producing a 'second generation.' SORABUMI breaks down what happened 700 million and 2.4 billion light-years away, and how spin patterns exposed a hierarchy of mergers.
JWST kept finding strange red dots in the early universe, dubbed 'Little Red Dots.' In June 2026, a spectrum of one such object, GLIMPSE-17775, revealed over 40 emission lines and 16 iron absorption lines — proof it isn't a galaxy at all, but a black hole wrapped in gas. From space media outlet SORABUMI.
For the first time, astronomers have directly detected a powerful wind blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Why did it take half a century to spot? And what does this discovery mean for how galaxies evolve?
At the center of two dwarf galaxies named Perias and Nereus, astronomers found black holes that account for up to 60% of the galaxy's stellar mass — a figure that should be 0.1 to 0.5%. JWST is rewriting what we thought we knew about the early universe.
Cygnus X-1 — humanity's first confirmed black hole — is firing a jet at half the speed of light. For the first time, astronomers have directly measured its power: the equivalent of 10,000 suns. Here's what 18 years of observations and a 'dancing jet' revealed.
At the center of galaxy J1007+3540, a black hole that had been dormant for 100 million years suddenly fired up a new jet. Radio telescopes captured something rare: ancient fossil plasma and a fresh new outburst in the same frame. Why do black holes go quiet — and what makes them wake up?
Stars, galaxies, gas — everything we can observe makes up just 5% of the universe. The other 95% is something we can't see. Dark matter and dark energy sit at the heart of modern cosmology, and we still don't know what either of them is.
Two different methods for measuring how fast the universe is expanding keep giving different answers. A landmark April 2026 measurement has now ruled out measurement error as the explanation — and what's left is genuinely unsettling.
Two of the universe's most extreme objects collide — and the last few milliseconds of that encounter trace all the way back to the origin of gold and platinum. Gravitational waves have finally let us witness this cosmic clash up close.
Black holes trap even light—so how can we see a glowing ring around them? This explainer walks through the photon sphere, the EHT image of M87, and the gravitational lensing that turns the cosmos's darkest objects into its most spectacular portraits.