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Astronomers have created a new map of the universe which includes 1.3 million supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centre of galaxies. SMBHs have a mass between 100,000 and 10 billion times that of our own Sun. They are typically found at the centre of galaxies. The gravitational pull of these SMBHs creates a hot, […]

At some point we’ve all regretted taking too long to make a move on that special someone, but at least there’s comfort knowing we didn’t take a quarter of all time that’s ever passed. 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.Continue ReadingCategory: Space, ScienceTags: Astronomy, Black hole, Supermassive...

You’d assume that the brightest object in the known universe would be a pretty easy thing to discover, but astronomers have only just spotted it. This overlooked show-off is a supermassive black hole with the mass of 17 billion Suns, and counting – it swallows another Sun's worth of material every day, making it also the fastest-growing black hole ever found.Continue ReadingCategory: Space, ScienceTags:...

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.Continue ReadingCategory: Space, ScienceTags: Astronomy, Black hole, Supermassive black hole, Galaxy, relativity, X-ray, Radio, Very Large Array

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.Continue ReadingCategory: Space, ScienceTags: Black hole, Supermassive black hole, Galaxy, James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, Infrared, Telescope, Distance, Cosmology

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed the oldest black hole ever observed. And it appears to be ‘eating’ its host galaxy. Our best estimates place the universe at about 13.8 billion years old. This black hole dates to a period only about 400 million years after the birth of the cosmos in the […]