Content tagged "black holes".
8 items (8 articles, 0 stories)
Just 0.55 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, an aging giant star called IRS 3 keeps producing water and silicate dust in one of the galaxy's harshest radiation zones. JWST caught the moment. A story of the universe quietly making things, from SORABUMI.
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.
How do you find a black hole you can't see? At the center of Omega Centauri, seven stars are moving fast enough to escape the cluster — yet they never leave. That contradiction points to an intermediate-mass black hole with at least 8,200 times the Sun's mass. SORABUMI breaks down how two decades of Hubble images uncovered it.
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.'
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.
Galaxy clusters — the most massive objects in the universe — may contain roughly twice the baryonic mass astronomers have long assumed. The culprit is something no one bothered counting seriously: the accumulated remains of dead stars.