The mechanism by which black holes glow remains an unsolved mystery for scientists
A team of astronomers studied 16 supermassive black holes that shoot powerful beams into space to track where the beams, or jets, are pointing now and where they were pointing in the past. Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA) at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), they found that some of the beams had changed direction by a large amount.
James Webb Telescope Reveals Supermassive Black Holes of the Early Universe
Peering deep into space and time, two teams using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have studied an exceptionally bright galaxy called GN-z11, which existed when our 13.8-billion-year-old universe was only about 430 million years old. Also studying JWST data, a team of astronomers led by Lukas Furtak and Adi Zitrin of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev were also able to determine the mass of the supermassive black hole. At about 40 million times the mass of the Sun, it is surprisingly massive compared to the galaxy it hosts.
Several black holes have been discovered in our Milky Way galaxy. At the galaxy’s heart is a dormant one 4.2 million times larger than the Sun
The black holes at the center of the Milky Way (Earth’s home galaxy) and Andromeda (one of our closest galactic neighbors) are among the quietest eaters in the universe. What little light they emit varies subtly in brightness, suggesting that they consume a small but steady stream of matter rather than large clumps. The streams approach the black hole gradually and in a spiral, like water swirling down a drain.
Supermassive black holes protect galaxies from growing too large
Galaxies could live longer if supermassive black holes act as their “hearts and lungs,” keeping them breathing and preventing them from growing too big. That’s the suggestion of a new study, which suggests that the universe would have aged much faster and today be filled with “zombie” galaxies containing dead or dying stars if it weren’t for the supermassive black holes that are thought to reside at the heart of all large galaxies. The astrophysicists behind the discoveries compare the jets of gas and radiation that supermassive black holes blow from their poles into their airways to breathing and lungs.
Black Hole Systems: Gravitational Waves of Space-Time Learned to Catch on Earth
Astronomers have discovered supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the Sun in most massive galaxies in the local Universe, including our own Milky Way. Webb’s new observations provide evidence of an ongoing merger of two galaxies and their massive black holes when the Universe was just 740 million years old. The system is known as ZS7. Most black hole binaries are expected to be in what are called “quasi-circular” orbits. The giant black holes are thought to have been created when two smaller black holes collided and merged one day. And now scientists are wondering if we can learn about the black hole family tree by working backwards through the generations.
Anomalous ‘light’ black holes are primordial in the Universe
Black holes are formed either by the collapse of a massive star or by the merger of heavy objects. However, scientists suspect that smaller “primordial” black holes, including some with masses similar to the Earth, may have formed in the chaotic early moments of the universe. When we think of black holes, we tend to picture enormous cosmic monsters, such as stellar-mass black holes with masses tens or hundreds of times that of the Sun. We can even imagine supermassive black holes, with masses millions (or even billions) of times that of the Sun, sitting at the hearts of galaxies and dominating their surroundings. A team of scientists has predicted that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could detect a class of “light” black holes that have eluded detection until now.
Latest news on the theory of structure and origin of black holes
Supermassive black holes are thought to be born from successive mergers of smaller black holes, each bringing with it angular momentum that accelerates the spin of the black hole they birth. Measuring the spin of supermassive black holes can therefore provide insight into their history – and a new study suggests a new way to make such inferences based on the effects of spinning black holes on the very fabric of space and time.
The black hole in Omega Centauri is closer to Earth than the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
Most known black holes are either extremely massive, like the supermassive black holes found at the cores of large galaxies, or relatively light, with masses less than 100 solar masses. However, intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are rare and are considered rare “missing links” in black hole evolution.