The cosmic enigma created by evidence of seemingly massive black holes in the very early universe continues to deepen. JWST observations of one such anomaly, known as J1120+0641, show that the once-favored explanation for how these objects could emit so much light so quickly after the Big Bang is unlikely, forcing astronomers to try again. … Read more
A bright quasar, powered by a supermassive black hole, is blasting radiation that blows away clouds of gas in its surroundings to generate winds that reach speeds of about 36 million miles per hour (58 million kilometers per hour). Oh, and the quasar is also almost as old as the universe itself. The discovery, made … Read more
Credit: NASA For the past seven decades, astrophysicists have theorized the existence of “kugelblitze,” black holes caused by extremely high concentrations of light. These particular black holes, they speculated, could be related to astronomical phenomena such as dark matter, and have even been suggested as the power source of hypothetical spacecraft engines in the distant … Read more
Artist’s impression of a microlensing event caused by a black hole observed from Earth toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. Light from a background star located in the LMC is bent by a putative primordial black hole (lens) in the galactic halo and magnified when observed from Earth. Microlensing causes very characteristic variation in the brightness … Read more
Astronomers are witnessing a spectacle never before seen in the cosmos: the awakening of a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. In late 2019, a team of astronomers spotted an unusual galaxy called SDSS1335+0728, 300 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. A sudden bump in the galaxy’s brightness was automatically … Read more