Topic

Black holes

44 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 21, 2026.

Physics
Black Holes Ten Times the Sun's Mass and Black Holes Millions of Times Heavier Turn On Their Jets at Exactly the Same Point: When Feeding Drops to 2% of the Eddington Limit

Tidal disruption events compress a supermassive black hole's feeding cycle from millennia into years. A Curtin-IAS team found the delayed radio jets, arriving hundreds to thousands of days after a star is torn apart, switch on at the same threshold known from X-ray binaries in our galaxy. 'The physics does not seem to care how big they are.'

Sep 21 3 min read
Science
Webb Looked Through the Dust at the Squid Galaxy's Black Hole and Found an Outflow Up to 100 Times More Powerful Than Anyone Had Measured

NGC 1068 is 45 million light-years away and one of the best-studied active galaxies in the sky. The hidden component moves 300 km/s faster than the visible one, tops 2,000 km/s and is escaping the galaxy for good.

Sep 15 3 min read
Science
Harvard Astronomers Mapped Nine Galaxies With Feeding Black Holes and Found Rings of Newborn Stars 2,600 to 20,000 Light-Years Out

A new three-way diagnostic separates starlight, black-hole radiation and shocks pixel by pixel. It suggests active black holes can trigger star formation as well as choke it.

Sep 14 3 min read
Science
A Radio Source in the Milky Way Has Been Blazing for 21 Years, Brightened Sixfold, Never Expanded and Emits No X-Rays

VT J1906+0849 is the brightest transient in the entire VLA Sky Survey. Its brightness temperature is up to 10 billion kelvin, gas near it moves at thousands of kilometers per second, and it flared again in late 2025. Nothing in the catalog of known galactic sources fits.

Sep 14 4 min read
Physics
A Black Hole Merger Caught in October 2024 Had a Fast-Spinning 19.6-Solar-Mass Primary

Nine years after proposing the test, a Birmingham–Perimeter team measured how rotation squashed the heavier object in GW241011. Rotating boson stars with quartic self-interactions cannot explain it.

Sep 13 4 min read
Physics
If a Black Hole Has 'Hair,' Its Ring Will Wobble One Way and Fade Another

Nagoya University physicists found that hidden matter around a black hole shifts the frequency and the decay rate of its gravitational-wave ringdown by different amounts — a mismatch detectors could look for.

Sep 7 3 min read
Science
Sloan's 20th Data Release Hands Over Three Million Spectra and Its First Southern Sky

DR20 includes half a million black hole spectra, 1.5 million Milky Way stars and the survey's first optical spectroscopy from the Southern Hemisphere — all of it free to anyone who wants it.

Sep 7 3 min read
Physics
A Black Hole the Weight of a Loaded Semitruck Can Live Inside a Star, If Dark Matter Feeds It

Hawking radiation should evaporate anything that small in an instant. Three physicists calculated the point where dark matter falling in outruns the radiation leaking out.

Sep 5 3 min read
Physics
A Supermassive Black Hole Is Fleeing Its Galaxy at 1,000 Kilometers a Second

RBH-1 left a trail of newborn stars 202,000 light-years long. A Santa Barbara team worked backward to the merger that threw it out, about 70 million years ago.

Sep 5 3 min read
Physics
Twelve Dead Radio Galaxies Faded in About 12 Million Years. Astronomers Expected Far Longer

When a supermassive black hole switches its jets off, the leftover lobes were thought to glow for a long, slow stretch. A survey with MeerKAT found the afterlife is short — and earlier searches were looking for the wrong thing.

Sep 4 3 min read
Physics
The Biggest Black Hole Merger Ever Detected Just Shrank. A Lens in the Way Made It Look Twice as Heavy

GW231123 was reported as a 190-to-265-solar-mass collision. A Max Planck reanalysis published Thursday says gravitational lensing magnified the signal, and the real total is 100 to 180.

Sep 3 3 min read
Physics
The Low Hum Running Through the Galaxy's Pulsars May Be the Echo of Stars Made of Dark Matter

Colgate physicists calculate that the remnants of hypothetical 'Dark Stars' from cosmic dawn could dominate the gravitational-wave background that pulsar timing arrays have been measuring.

Aug 29 3 min read
Physics
Nine Out of Ten Black Holes in the Milky Way Have No Companion Star — Which Is Why We Have Never Seen Them

A Flatiron Institute simulation of the galaxy’s entire history finds that about 91% of stellar-mass black holes drift alone, and roughly 3% were kicked out of the galaxy altogether.

Aug 3 3 min read
Physics
Black Holes Throw Back Nearly as Much Matter as They Eat, a Warwick Team Found by Watching One Fade

Observations of Swift J1727.8−1613 with the Very Large Telescope caught powerful outflows still running after the system had dimmed to a hundredth of its peak brightness.

Aug 1 3 min read
Physics
Physicists Rewrite Hawking's Black Hole Laws to Work on Real, Ever-Changing Black Holes

A Penn State team led by Abhay Ashtekar has devised a new entropy measure that extends the laws of black hole thermodynamics to objects that grow, merge and evaporate — not just idealized, static ones.

Jul 14 3 min read
Physics
Physicists Recreate a Black Hole's Energy-Stealing Trick in the Lab for the First Time

A CUNY team built a spinning system out of engineered metamaterials that amplifies passing waves — reproducing the half-century-old Penrose-Zel'dovich process once thought possible only around a rotating black hole.

Jul 13 3 min read
Physics
Those 'Impossible' Early Black Holes Webb Found May Not Be Giants After All, New Analysis Says

Astronomers argue the universe's X-ray-silent, seemingly overmassive black holes are actually smaller objects feeding at furious rates — a finding that could defuse one of cosmology's freshest crises.

Jul 11 3 min read
Physics
Physicists Recreate Hawking Radiation in a Strand of Fiber — and Find It's Simpler Than Anyone Thought

A tabletop 'black hole' made of light offers the clearest evidence yet for Stephen Hawking's most famous prediction, and a rare window into quantum gravity.

Jul 10 2 min read
Science
Euclid Telescope Spots the Oldest Quasars Ever Seen, Deepening a Cosmic Mystery

The European space telescope found 31 ancient quasars — two of them shining from when the universe was just 5% of its current age.

Jul 9 3 min read
Physics
Gravitational-Wave Hunters Unveil a 390-Collision Catalog, Catching the Clearest Black-Hole 'Ring' Yet

A single 10-month observing run added 161 new detections, nearly doubling the record — and delivered the sharpest gravitational-wave signal ever recorded, along with hints that some black holes are built from earlier black holes.

Jul 9 2 min read
Science
James Webb's Mysterious 'Little Red Dots' May Be Newborn Supermassive Black Holes, New Spectrum Suggests

The most detailed spectrum yet of one of these ancient objects strongly favors a black hole cloaked in hot gas over a galaxy full of stars — evidence, researchers say, of heavy black-hole seeds being born in real time.

Jul 5 3 min read
Physics
LIGO's Biggest-Ever Catalog Adds 161 Black Hole Collisions, Pushing Detections to 390

The new LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA release includes the clearest gravitational-wave signal ever recorded and fresh evidence that some black holes are built from the wreckage of earlier mergers.

Jul 4 3 min read
Physics
Physicists Propose the Universe 'Remembers,' Offering a New Path to Dark Matter and Dark Energy

A Leiden University team's 'Quantum Memory Matrix' theory suggests spacetime stores an imprint of every interaction, a single framework its authors say could also resolve the black-hole information paradox.

Jun 18 3 min read
Science
Astronomers Devise a Way to Spot Hidden Supermassive Black Hole Pairs by Their Flickering Starlight

Oxford and Max Planck scientists say tightly bound black-hole binaries act as cosmic lenses, magnifying background stars into repeating flashes that betray their presence.

Jun 18 3 min read
Physics
Dying Stars Could Create New Universes Instead of Black Holes, Physicists Propose

Theoretical study suggests massive stellar collapse might trigger birth of tiny cosmos driven by dark energy, forming exotic objects called gravastars.

Jun 15 3 min read
Physics
Scientists Propose Dying Stars Could Birth New Universes Instead of Black Holes

Revolutionary gravastar theory suggests massive stellar collapse triggers miniature universe creation, challenging conventional black hole formation.

Jun 14 2 min read
Physics
Dying Star Could Create New Universe Instead of Black Hole

Scientists propose that massive stellar collapse might trigger the birth of a tiny cosmos inside the dying star.

Jun 14 2 min read
Physics
Astronomers Devise a Way to Catch Hidden Black Hole Pairs by the Starlight They Make Flicker

Researchers at Oxford and the Max Planck Institute propose hunting elusive supermassive black hole binaries by watching for repeating flashes of background starlight bent and magnified as the pair orbits.

Jun 7 3 min read
Science
A Black Hole 'Feeding Frenzy' May Solve the Mystery of Giant Black Holes in the Early Universe

New simulations suggest small 'seed' black holes gorged on gas faster than thought possible, explaining the monsters the James Webb telescope found just after the Big Bang.

Jun 5 3 min read
Physics
Scientists May Have Found Source of Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Detected

Researchers point to blazars—supermassive black holes shooting plasma jets toward Earth—as likely origin of record-breaking 220 PeV particle.

May 29 2 min read
Physics
Scientists Trace Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Detected to Cosmic 'Blazar' Black Holes

Researchers believe the 220 PeV particle detected in Mediterranean Sea originated from supermassive black holes shooting jets directly toward Earth.

May 25 3 min read
Physics
Scientists Identify Blazars as Source of Universe's Most Powerful Neutrino Ever Detected

Researchers believe the record-breaking 220 PeV particle detected in the Mediterranean Sea originated from supermassive black holes shooting jets directly toward Earth.

May 25 3 min read
Physics
Scientists Track Source of Universe's Most Powerful Neutrino

Researchers identify blazars as likely culprits behind record-breaking cosmic particle detected in Mediterranean Sea.

May 24 3 min read
Physics
Scientists Identify Source of Most Powerful Cosmic Neutrino Ever Detected

Researchers trace mysterious 220 PeV particle that slammed through Mediterranean Sea to blazars—supermassive black holes shooting jets directly at Earth.

May 24 3 min read
Physics
Black Holes May Reveal Dark Matter Secrets Through Gravitational Wave Fingerprints

MIT physicists develop new method to detect dark matter interactions hidden within cosmic collisions, with one LIGO signal showing potential evidence.

May 21 3 min read
Physics
Gravitational Waves May Carry First Dark Matter Fingerprints From Black Hole Collisions

MIT physicists have developed a new method to search for dark matter signatures in ripples from merging black holes, with one LIGO signal showing promising results.

May 20 2 min read
Science
James Webb Spots Two Early Black Holes Outrunning Their Host Galaxies, With One Tipping the Scale at 9 Percent of Its Galaxy's Stellar Mass

New JWST observations of COLA1 and NEPLA4 — galaxies seen only 800 million years after the Big Bang — show black holes far larger relative to their host galaxies than any modern counterpart, deepening the puzzle of how the universe built its giants so quickly.

May 20 3 min read
Physics
Gravitational Waves May Carry First Fingerprints of Dark Matter from Colliding Black Holes

MIT physicists detect potential dark matter signature in LIGO data, offering new way to study the universe's most mysterious substance.

May 19 2 min read
Physics
James Webb and VLT Spot Most Massive Black Hole Pair Ever Found — Two 30-Billion-Solar-Mass Giants Bound for Merger

A starless gulf 3,200 light-years across at the heart of galaxy Abell 402-BCG turns out to be a gravitational scar carved by two ultramassive black holes, together weighing 60 billion suns and headed for an eventual merger LISA may one day hear.

May 18 3 min read
Physics
Copenhagen Team Solves JWST's 'Little Red Dots' Mystery: They're Cocooned Young Black Holes

A new Nature paper from the Niels Bohr Institute slashes black-hole mass estimates 100-fold and finally explains the strange crimson points scattered across Webb's deep-field images.

May 4 3 min read
Physics
Record-Breaking Gravitational Wave GW250114 Confirms Hawking's 1971 Black Hole Theorem

The clearest black hole merger ever recorded — with a signal-to-noise ratio nearly three times higher than LIGO's first detection — verified multiple tones predicted by Einstein's general relativity.

Apr 13 4 min read
Physics
Astronomers Release Largest Gravitational Wave Catalog Ever: 218 Detections Including the Heaviest Black Hole Binary in History

The GWTC-4 catalog, led by MIT, adds 128 new events from LIGO's fourth observing run — including a 260-solar-mass merger, the fastest-spinning binary on record, and a new measurement of the universe's expansion rate.

Mar 29 5 min read
Science
James Webb Telescope's Unexplained 'Little Red Dots' Defy Cosmological Models — and Scientists Are Stumped

Appearing in nearly every deep-field image since Webb launched, hundreds of mysterious luminous objects in the early universe remain unexplained despite hundreds of scientific studies — and may force a rethink of how the first black holes formed.

Mar 29 3 min read
Physics
IceCube Pins High-Energy Cosmic Neutrinos to Supermassive Black Holes in X-Ray Bright Galaxies — Opening New Window on Universe's Most Violent Engines

Cross-referencing a decade of Antarctic neutrino data with X-ray telescope observations, scientists have found the strongest statistical evidence yet that X-ray luminous active galactic nuclei are a primary source of cosmic neutrinos.

Mar 28 4 min read