The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Milky Way, but a newly spotted object takes the crown for the most massive stellar black hole known in our galaxy, weighing in at an impressive 33 times the mass of our Sun.
A new image of our galaxy’s central black hole reveals the magnetic field surrounding the object in polarized light. The image reveals how gas and superheated matter in the immediate vicinity of the black hole move around it. But aside from that, it’s a great way to visualize the extreme physics happening at the…
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The center of our galaxy is a menagerie of exotic objects; a supermassive black hole, clouds of hot gas, and giant stars that can help inform the origin story of much of the universe. Using the Webb telescope, scientists got to see this chaotic region of the Milky Way in a different light, revealing new features and…
On June 22, 2022, NASA’s Swift Observatory spotted something curious in a galaxy over 500 million light-years away. It was a routine outburst of gas that a team studying the data now believes is evidence of a black hole intermittently gobbling up a star each time the latter draws near.
Astronomers transfixed the public in April 2019 when they released the first-ever image of a black hole, produced by radio wave data from a collaboration of telescopes around the world known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope.
