black-holes

Supermassive black holes are among the most enigmatic objects in the universe. They typically weigh millions or even billions of times the mass of the Sun and sit at the centers of most large galaxies. At the heart of the Milky Way lies Sagittarius A*, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, with a mass of about […] The post What happens when a star gets too close to a black hole appeared first on …

Nature Astronomy, Published online: 30 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41550-026-02829-2 For a black hole X-ray binary system, the deflection of its radio jets by the stellar wind has been measured across an entire orbit. By balancing the momentum flux of the jets and the wind, the instantaneous kinetic power of the jet is determined and its value vindicates standard assumptions from cosmological simula…

Recently, several philosophers and physicists have increasingly noticed the hegemony of unitarity in the discourse on black hole information loss and are challenging its legitimacy in the face of the measurement problem. They proclaim that embracing non-unitarity solves two paradoxes for the price of one. Although I share their distaste regarding the philosophical bias, I disagree with their stra…

Astronomers watch a massive star collapse into a black hole without a supernova A massive star in Andromeda just vanished — and left behind a newborn black hole glowing in the dark. - Date: - February 14, 2026 - Source: - Simons Foundation - Summary: - A massive star 2.5 million light-years away simply vanished — and astronomers now know why. Instead of exploding in a supernova, it quietly collap…

It's a well-known fact that Supermassive Black Holes (SMBH) play a vital role in the evolution of galaxies. Their powerful gravity and the way it accelerates matter in its vicinity causes so much radiation to be released from the core region - aka. an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) - that it will periodically outshine all the stars in the disk combined. In addition, some SMBHs accelerate infalling…

Black holes are objects so dense that they warp space time to an extreme degree. They may be better described as places than objects, but regardless, the point stands. So strong is their effect that not even light can esacpe their grasp. The regions around black holes, and especially supermassive black holes (SMBH) like the one in the center of the Milky Way, are extreme environments. The gravity…

The two fuzzy doughnuts that stunned the world in 2019 and 2022, humanity’s first direct images of black holes, were revolutionary, but they captured only a moment. Gas swirls around these cosmic engines at nearly light speed, magnetic fields twist and snap, and spacetime itself warps under extreme gravity. None of that motion appeared in those static snapshots. Dr. Kazunori Akiyama, who helped c…

The Boundawall: A Proposal on the Nature of Black Holes Author(s) Viaña, JavierAbstract This research suggests a new interpretation of black holes in which the event horizon represents the termination of physical reality. In this view, when curvature approaches a critical threshold, the three-dimensional spatial geometry may undergo a dimensional compression into a two-dimensional manifold—the bo…

Entropy and spectrum of near-extremal black holes: semiclassical brane solutions to non-perturbative problems Author(s) Hernández-Cuenca, SergioAbstract The black hole entropy has been observed to generically turn negative at exponentially low temperatures T ~ e − S 0 in the extremal Bekenstein-Hawking entropy S0, a seeming pathology often attributed to missing non-perturbative effects. In fact, …

Their source could be the core of a dead star that’s teetering at the black hole’s edge, MIT astronomers report. One supermassive black hole has kept astronomers glued to their scopes for the last several years. First came a surprise disappearance, and now, a precarious spinning act. The black hole in question is 1ES 1927+654, […] The post X-ray flashes from a nearby supermassive black hole accel…

Illustration of matter in an accretion disk falling into a black hole. (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman). The actual image of the disk will be distorted due to the intense gravitational field and will probably look like the following image. Outside the black hole, it depends on what form the matter takes. If … Continue reading What happens to matter when it falls into…

Analysis reveals a tiny black hole repeatedly punching through a larger black hole’s disk of gas. At the heart of a far-off galaxy, a supermassive black hole appears to have had a case of the hiccups. Astronomers from MIT, Italy, the Czech Republic, and elsewhere have found that a previously quiet black hole, which sits […] The post Persistent “hiccups” in a far-off galaxy draw astronomers to new…

New finding might explain why quasars flare and fade so quickly A new Northwestern University-led study is changing the way astrophysicists understand the eating habits of supermassive black holes. While previous researchers have hypothesized that black holes eat slowly, new simulations indicate that black holes scarf food much faster than conventional understanding suggests. The study was

The puzzling behavior of black hole interiors has led researchers to propose a new physical law: the second law of quantum complexity. The post In New Paradox, Black Holes Appear to Evade Heat Death first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Ritesh just posted his new paper on angular momentum in black hole binaries on the arXiv. The paper is collaborative work with Prof. Richard Price at MIT. Angular Momentum for Black Hole Binaries in Numerical Relativity Ritesh Bachhar, Richard Price, Gaurav Khanna Preprint: arXiv:2301.01185 (2023)

A binary tree approach to template placement for searches for gravitational waves from compact binary mergers Chad Hanna, James Kennington, Shio Sakon, Stephen Privitera, Miguel Fernandez, Jonathan Wang, Cody Messick, Alex Pace, Kipp Cannon, Prathamesh Joshi, Rachael Huxford, Sarah Caudill, Chiwai Chan, Bryce Cousins, Jolien D. E. Creighton, Becca Ewing, Heather Fong, Patrick Godwin, Ryan Magee, …

[This is a transcript of the video embedded below. Some of the explanations may not make sense without the animations in the video.] Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little black hole in your office? You know, maybe as a trash bin. Or to move around the furniture. Or just as a kind of nerdy gimmick. Why can we not make black holes? Or can we? If we could, what could we do with them? And what’s a

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/a-swift-kick-sends-a-black-hole-careening Multiple members of UGRC collaborated with others in the field to make this major discovery — gravitational recoil or “kick” from a black hole binary merger. Congrats, Scott, Tousif and Feroz! Phys. Rev. Lett. 128, 191102 (2022) [Featured, Editor’s Suggestion] Check out a news story from UMassD about this disc…

It was not until the past few decades that physicists have made remarkable experimental advancements in the study of black holes, such as with the Event Horizon Telescope and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. On the theoretical side, there are still lingering questions regarding the thermodynamics of these objects.  It is well known that black … Continue reading "Universali…

Tousif Islam, Vijay Varma, Jackie Lodman, Scott E. Field, Gaurav Khanna, Mark A. Scheel, Harald P. Pfeiffer, Davide Gerosa, Lawrence E. Kidder published Phys. Rev. D 103, 064022 (2021).