Supermassive black hole
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The very fabric of spacetime is constantly warping on unimaginably tiny scales, as ripples from past cataclysms wash over us. Astrophysicists have now detected a background sea of gravitational waves, using a galaxy-scale detector of dead stars.
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At the heart of our galaxy lurks a supermassive monster, currently slumbering. But new observations reveal an X-ray “echo” from a time when the Milky Way’s central black hole awoke just 200 years ago, shining a million times brighter than today.
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Decades ago, the astronomy world was taken aback by the discovery of tall light filaments spiking out from around our galaxy's central black hole. Now more filaments have been found, only these have some significant – and puzzling – differences.
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Astronomers have captured the biggest cosmic explosion ever detected. About 100 times bigger than the solar system and two trillion times brighter than the Sun at its peak, the mysterious miasma has remained visible for three years.
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Astronomers have detected a supermassive black hole ripping a passing star to shreds. Not only was this closer to Earth than ever seen before, but its location and light emissions were unusual, hinting at a large unseen population of these events.
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