As well as pulling in anything which comes to close to them, black holes can occasionally expel matter at very high speeds. When clouds of dust and gas approach the event horizon of a black hole, some of it will fall inward, but some can be redirected outward in highly energetic bursts, resulting in dramatic…
At the heart of almost every galaxy, including our own, is a monstrously large black hole with mass millions or billions of times that of the sun. These supermassive black holes are generally lonely beasts, but astronomers have recently discovered the closest-ever pair of them which will eventually merge into one even larger black hole….
A Quick Look at V404 Cygni Astronomers are observing an unusual black hole which is surrounded by enormous X-ray rings. Using the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, researchers have been investigating how this strange phenomenon came to be and what it can tell us about both black holes and cosmic dust….
Artist’s impression of a relativistic jet of a gamma-ray burst (GRB), breaking out of a collapsing star, and emitting very-high-energy photons. DESY, Science Communication Lab When you think of the most dramatic events in the universe, you might think about stars going supernova or about black holes colliding and sending ripples through spacetime. But the…