Supermassive black hole

A recent analysis by a team of researchers from Poland and the US points to a surprising new method for world-building, one that could generate some of the largest populations of planets in the Universe.

Astronomers have spotted an absolutely colossal cosmic chimney that stretches as far as 140 Milky Ways lined up side by side. These jumbo jets are being blasted from a supermassive black hole.

Astronomers have watched a supermassive black hole take two bites of a star, and predicted when it might go back for a third. If it does, this should make for an intriguing stellar light show.

Supermassive black holes have been known to belch gigantic beams of plasma into space – and now scientists have managed to recreate these fireballs in a lab at CERN.

What would it look like to fall into a black hole? It’s a question basically everyone has pondered, and now NASA has finally given us a first-person view of the experience with scientifically-accurate visualizations produced by a supercomputer.

We’ve all regretted taking too long to make a move, but at least it wasn't 3 billion years. That’s how long the sexual tension has been building between two slow-dancing supermassive black holes, whose eventual congress could rock the entire universe.

The brightest object in the known universe has just been found. It's a supermassive black hole with the mass of 17 billion Suns, and it swallows another Suns’ worth of material every day, making it also the fastest-growing black hole ever found.

A supermassive monster lurks at the center of our galaxy, and astronomers have now discovered that it’s spinning so fast it’s warping the very fabric of spacetime into a football shape.

Astronomers have mapped out half the universe in X-ray light, using a space telescope called eROSITA. The new map, which contains almost a million X-ray sources, is the basis of dozens of new scientific papers, with many more to come.

Astronomers have discovered the most distant – and therefore earliest – known black hole. Hiding in a galaxy called GN-z11, this black hole is bigger than should be possible given the age of the universe.

You’d never notice one star in the galaxy that wasn’t from around here. Astronomers have now found that a star right near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way likely originated in a smaller galaxy that ours devoured.

Astronomers have discovered evidence of a theorized type of black hole lurking in the distant universe. Known as an “Outsize Black Hole,” this object could help explain some fundamental cosmic mysteries, including how supermassive monsters form.