Content tagged "black holes".
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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.
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.