Scientists have long known that when two black holes collide, they merge to create a more massive black hole. These events are so violent that they set the very fabric of space ringing with ripples called gravitational waves.

Now, new research suggests that the opposite may happen, too: single black holes may be able to split in two. But this can only happen if that progenitor black hole is spinning at maximum possible speed. That speed prevents the black holes from immediately falling back on each other.

There are physical laws in place that would usually prevent black holes from splitting in two; the team behind this research investigated whether there are conditions in which these laws can be temporarily bypassed.

One of the key aspects of physics that prevents black holes from bifurcating comes from thermodynamics. Black holes possess a characteristic called "entropy," which is essentially a measure of disorder within a system.

Imagine a toddler's crayon box. When entropy is low, the crayons are neatly arranged by color. As entropy is increased, the crayons are scattered and no longer in order. To get the crayons back in order, it requires a parent to put energy into the system and neatly reorder the crayons. In other words, the entropy of a system can't be reduced without some intervention and energy being added from outside that system. Parenting would be a little easier if it could.

A black hole splitting in two would represent a decrease in entropy, strongly disfavored by the laws of thermodynamics, but only if the black hole is not rotating. The situation could be different for a rapidly rotating black hole.

This team of scientists found that a loophole exists for such a black hole.

"The two resulting black holes must also be able to separate rather than immediately fall back together," team member Francesco Sannino of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy said in a statement. "When we include this requirement, the window largely closes again, except possibly for black holes rotating close to their maximum possible rate."

Black hole trousers?

The team calculated just how such a black hole split could occur, finding that the division of the black hole's outer boundary, or "event horizon," proceeds in an oddly trouser-like shape, with one resulting black hole slipping down each "leg."

They termed this "pair-of-pants topologies."

The researchers also determined that a split is more likely to take place if one of the resultant black holes is considerably smaller than its newly born twin.

"We cannot yet give a single probability for a black hole to split. It depends on how gravity behaves beyond Einstein's theory, and we are working to quantify this," Sannino said. "We expect small primordial black holes to be more prone to splitting than much larger astrophysical black holes."

Sannino added that such black hole splits may be detectable in high-energy light called gamma-rays.

"We may detect a split indirectly: gamma-ray telescopes such as Fermi-LAT can search for signals from tiny black-hole fragments that might form during mergers," the researcher concluded.

The team's research was published on Oct. 22 in the journal Physical Review D.

Astronomers estimate that our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has churned out more than 10 million black holes over its 13-billion-year history. Yet so far, they have found only 70.

Now, a group of astronomers in the U.K. is trying to close that vast gap by enlisting the public. Their project, called Black Hole Hunters, is looking for volunteers with a computer and a few spare minutes to sift through troves of data gathered by a NASA space telescope. By flagging recognizable patterns that could point to a "missing" black hole, volunteers can help fast-track a search that would otherwise take years, the team says.

"You'll be narrowing down precisely where we need to point our telescopes next," project co-lead Adam McMaster, an astronomer at the University of Southampton in the U.K., said in a statement, "and you might be the one to discover a black hole."

Cosmic magnifying glasses

Black holes form when massive stars roughly 20 times heavier than our sun run out of fuel and collapse, leaving behind an abyss with gravity so immense that even light cannot escape. While invisible themselves, these cosmic behemoths reveal their presence by bending the light of nearby objects, and the Black Hole Hunters project is searching for one specific manifestation of this effect.

It happens thanks to the fact that massive stars often form in pairs, and a star can sometimes survive the violent supernova explosion that turns its companion into a black hole. When that happens, the two bodies continue to orbit each other. If such a duo aligns just right with Earth, the black hole will periodically pass directly between its companion star and our planet. And when it does, the black hole's gravity acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and magnifying the star's light, causing it to briefly appear brighter to watchful telescopes.

To find these hidden giants, the project relies on data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS. Although the satellite's primary mission is to hunt for planets beyond our solar system, its method of data collection — tracking tiny, continuous changes in a star's brightness over time — is ideally suited for identifying black hole magnification events, the project description notes.

"It's a simple task with no expertise required," McMaster said in the statement. "We will show volunteers examples of what to look for so all they have to do is recognise the right patterns."

Automated algorithms conduct a preliminary sweep of the TESS data, screening millions of potential stars for the most obvious black hole candidate locations, according to the project description. But, the researchers say, artificial intelligence struggles with the messy realities of the cosmos, such as stellar flares and the natural pulsations of stars that can trick the algorithms into false positives.

The human touch

That makes human volunteers a key part of the search. To keep errors in check, each graph is shown to multiple volunteers, and their answers are combined so that individual mistakes average out, according to the project's website.

"I can search for black holes on my laptop from my bedroom — and could make a real impact on real space science," Grace Clarke, an undergraduate student of physics and astronomy at the University of Southampton who's involved with the project, said in the same statement. "The data's easy to understand — it's just pattern recognition — and you don't need a degree in astronomy to read it."

The crowdsourced shortlist of promising signals lets astronomers aim follow-up observations at specific stars, such as precise measurements of whether a star is being tugged at by an unseen companion. Those measurements take time and are expensive, so a good shortlist helps researchers spend scarce telescope time wisely, the team says.

Since launching on the Zooniverse platform in October 2021, the project has attracted nearly 23,000 volunteers, who have completed more than 12 million classifications, according to its website.

Before turning to TESS, the team ran a similar search using data from SuperWASP, a ground-based survey that, like TESS, monitored stars for signs of planets from 2004 to 2016. Those results are still being analyzed and are expected to be published soon.

The team also plans to widen its search with observations from other instruments, including the European Space Agency's Euclid mission and NASA's recently launched Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

"With potentially thousands of new discoveries, we need all the help we can get," McMaster said in the statement.

What looks like a neon pink treble clef floating out in space is actually a bizarre source of radio waves spotted deep in the cosmos.

What is it?

Scientists using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have peered far out into space to look at strange radio waves coming from what they have nicknamed the "treble clef" because of its distinct shape, which looks a lot like the musical notation.

Using Chandra, as well as the German Extended RÖntgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array (eROSITA) X-ray telescope, researchers looking at this strange sight spotted a big cloud of blue gas, which we can see in this image, along with radio signals (seen here in bright pink). They think that this object is actually a huge galaxy cluster made up of two different clusters that are in the process of merging.

Why is it incredible?

The researchers think they may have gotten to the bottom of where these radio waves are coming from, they report in a new study.

The team thinks that the treble clef-shaped radio signals were created by an outburst from a supermassive black hole. They believe that this outburst pushed clouds of charged particles and magnetic fields away from the galaxy cluster's center, producing bright radio waves.

According to the scientists, following this bright outburst, there was likely an extreme collision between two galaxy clusters. This cosmic smash-up either compressed or somehow reenergized these charged particles to amplify the radio signal.

When we see beautiful images of objects in space such as this, they can seem just like peaceful, colorful, cosmic clouds. But when you look a bit deeper, these spectacular scenes can actually be evidence of violent, chaotic events.

This work was described in a study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Using the NASA X-ray spacecraft Swift combined with radio observations, astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole burping radio jets 300 days after a heavy cosmic meal. The team was also able to roughly estimate the mass of this feeding cosmic titan, which sits at the heart of the Perseus Cluster, a massive collection of thousands of galaxies.

The black hole sits at the center of the galaxy NGC 1275, located around 225 light-years away, and is the brightest galaxy of the Perseus Cluster. The supermassive black hole first flared in X-rays, which indicated an increase in the rate at which it was accreting matter. Actively feeding supermassive black holes sit in regions called active galactic nuclei (AGNs), with their immense gravity heating surrounding matter, causing them to glow brightly. These emissions are boosted by material channeled to the poles of the central black hole, from where it is blasted out as powerful twin jets that shine across the electromagnetic spectrum, particularly in radio waves.

The observation of the following radio jet from the AGN at the heart of NGC 1275 via flaring in radio waves is crucial for understanding the relationship between the disk of matter that surrounds and feeds the black hole, called an accretion disk, and the jets it launches. This so-called disk-jet coupling is key to developing a better picture of how black holes influence star formation in the galaxies in which they sit, and thus the growth of those galaxies.

Making these observations is no mean feat. The ideal spacecraft for observing X-ray emissions is Chandra, but it doesn't observe NGC 1275 frequently enough to observe its long-term behaviour. NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory may lack the power of Chandra, but having launched in 2004, it has collected a vast amount of data regarding NGC 1275 and its central supermassive black hole.

"It is fairly difficult to see the inner region of this AGN because NGC 1275 is at the center of the massive Perseus cluster of galaxies, which adds additional light to our observations," team leader Sarah Ketchum of the University of Michigan told Space.com. "We developed a model that allowed us to remove the cluster emission from archival Swift data, and in doing so, we were able to see the changes in the X-ray flux from gas accreting onto the black hole in NGC 1275, from 2007 to 2025."

Ketchum added that the capabilities of Swift were key to this investigation of NGC 1275, which is the ideal laboratory for the study of disk-jet coupling.

"There have been studies on other galaxies with AGN that show evidence of coupling between gas accretion traced in X-ray light and gas ejection in jets, traced in radio light. But NGC 1275 reveals the impact of black hole jets on large spatial scales better than any other system," the University of Michigan researcher continued.

This black hole didn't eat a star

Ketchum and colleagues saw the strongest ever X-ray flare from NGC 1275 in Feb. 2023. Lasting less than 60 days and consisting of two 5-day blasts, this episode saw a doubling of the X-ray brightness of the AGN at the heart of NGC 1275.

The flaring was so extreme that the team had to rule out a tidal disruption event (TDE) as the cause. These occur when an unfortunate star's orbit brings it too close to the immense gravitational influence of a supermassive black hole. This influence generates intense tidal forces that simultaneously squash and squeeze the star, "speghettifying" it and allowing the black hole to snack on some plasma pasta.

"We were able to rule out TDEs as a cause," Ketchum said. "Thus, the flaring was likely caused by a spike in the rate at which matter accreted onto the black hole."

Using Swift data, the team was able to infer the radius over which the AGN emits radiation. Because the size of a black hole is directly correlated with its mass, this meant that the researchers were able to constrain the mass of the black hole at the heart of NGC 1275. They determined that this supermassive black hole has a mass somewhere between 100 million times the mass of the sun and 1 billion solar masses.

The team then compared their data to known radio data to better understand the relationship between the X-ray emission and the radio jets that disrupt gas in NGC 1275.

Ketchum added that she and her colleagues found tentative evidence of around a 300-day delay between the X-ray flaring and the radio wave emission. This indicates the time it takes plasma to travel from the base of the jet to a knot or shock created when it hits surrounding gas or dust.

"This should be tested further in the future. Our X-ray data only sparsely sample the changes in NGC 1275," Ketchum said. "This makes it difficult to determine an exact relationship between the X-ray and radio radiation for large portions of our light curve, so we would need more X-ray data to further study this connection."

The researcher added that if the X-ray flares are produced close to the black hole, an echo of these flares should be seen coming from the accretion disk.

"An emission line from neutral iron is seen in data from NGC 1275, and this may be the echo. However, we likely need many observations with XMM-Newton and XRISM ( X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) to really establish that connection," Ketchum concluded.

The team's research has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, with a pre-peer-review version available on the repository site arXiv.

Astronomers have discovered the most distant and earliest blazar, comprised of an erupting supermassive black hole aiming its plasma jets directly at Earth.

Blazars occur when supermassive black holes are surrounded by vast amounts of gas and dust that they feed on, in regions called active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The immense gravity of these cosmic titans causes the surrounding gas and dust to glow brightly, meaning that AGNs can outshine the combined light of every star in the galaxies that house them. But that isn't all; matter that isn't feasted upon is channeled to the poles of the black hole, from where it is blasted out as twin jets of plasma moving at near-light speed.

These events are called quasars, but when the jets are directed straight down our line of sight, the quasar is classified as a blazar. Light from this high-energy blazar, designated Blazar OP 313, has been travelling to Earth for 8 billion years, meaning it is seen as it was just 5 billion years after the Big Bang during a crucial transitional phase in cosmic history.

"Around 11 billion years ago, the universe experienced a period of peak activity known as the 'cosmic noon,' characterised by an intense rate of star and galaxy formation," research team member Axel Arbet-Engels said in a statement."When this phase of intense activity slowed down and galaxies began to evolve and mature, the universe entered a calmer phase, which continues to this day."

The dawn of cosmic noon

Cosmic noon marked the period during which OP 313 emitted its powerful burst of very high-energy photons in the form of gamma-rays.

That emission was first observed in December 2023, with astronomers following up on the discovery with the Large-Sized Telescope (LST-1) prototype and the Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescope, both of which are located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, Spain.

This revealed high-energy gamma-rays originating 8 billion light-years away. The analysis of these gamma-rays revealed how the supermassive black hole at the heart of this blazar is acting as a cosmic particle accelerator.

As these gamma rays traversed the cosmos, they interacted with the total accumulated radiation from all the stars, galaxies, and other AGNs throughout cosmic history, known as the extragalactic background (EBL).

When gamma rays interact with this fossil light, they create electron-positron pairs, a process known as pair production. This depletes the number of gamma-ray photons in this signal. Using the LST-1 and MAGIC, the team was able to characterize this depletion, revealing that the intense gamma-ray emission was fueled by a dense population of so-called 'relativistic' electrons. Relativistic means travelling at speeds near that of light, with the blazar's central supermassive black hole as the engine that accelerated these particles.

"In what is known as the leptonic scenario, electrons have been accelerated to speeds close to the speed of light within a powerful plasma jet ejected by the central supermassive black hole of OP 313," team member Domenico Della Volpe of the University of Geneva said. "Upon colliding with lower-energy photons surrounding the black hole, the electrons transfer part of their considerable energy to these photons, thereby propelling them to energy levels corresponding to very high-energy gamma rays."

That means these findings could represent a major step forward for our understanding of quasars, some of the most powerful cosmic events ever detected by humanity.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (Oct. 6) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Scientists have discovered how jets launched by supermassive black holes can determine how their host galaxies "die." The research answers the long-standing question of why galaxies don't have more stars.

After all, large galaxies, including the Milky Way, are surrounded by huge cocoons of gas and dust called the circumgalactic medium, and that material serves as the raw building blocks for stars. During intense star-forming phases, this gas moves into galaxies and fuels this process, but eventually something stops this material from cooling, clumping, and birthing stars, or from moving into galaxies at all, effectively "killing" them.

This research suggests that when feeding supermassive black holes blast jets of plasma from around them, this reaches far beyond the center of galaxies where these cosmic titans reside and beyond their outer limits, thus disrupting the gas around galaxies. This has a major effect on how galaxies form stars and thus how they grow and evolve.

"This is a pathbreaking result that solves the long-standing mystery of how black holes influence galaxies, their stars, and life as we know it," team co-leader Sanchayeeta Borthakur of Arizona State University said in a statement. "This work opens a new direction to explore further the intricacies of the connection between the supermassive black holes trillions of miles from where we are to how we came to be here."

Black holes maybe small (relatively) but they pack a punch

Ok, supermassive black holes can't exactly be called "small," packing a mass millions or billions of times that of the sun into a width about that of the solar system. But compared to galaxies, which can host 100 billion similarly sized star systems, even these cosmic titans are relatively small in stature.

Even though feeding black holes can pour vast amounts of energy back into their cosmic environments via jets and radiation, the effect they have is still somewhat perplexing.

"The surprising question is: How can something so small energetically impact something so enormous?", team co-leader Namrata Roy of the Raman Research Institute said.

Roy and Borthakur focused their investigation on feeding or active black holes, using observations of hundreds of galaxies with active jets, collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey and radio jet measurements from the LOFAR Two-meter Sky Survey (LoTSS). They found points at which ionized gas glows brightly along their jets. This represents the plasma hitting and passing through clumps of surrounding gas, energizing it.

This indicates that black hole jets don't influence gas around galaxies in a uniform manner, but at preferred points. The greatest impact was seen close to the outer edges of galaxies, where plasma jets first hit the circumgalactic medium, and at the outer edge of the circumgalactic medium itself. That latter region is where the jets release the most energy.

The team's findings reveal clear fingerprints of the impact black hole jets have in disrupting potential star-forming material even right out to the circumgalactic medium. That's key in understanding how star formation is cut off and how galaxies are killed.

"What excites me most is the scale of the connection," Roy said. "A black hole is incredibly small compared to a galaxy, but its impact can reach hundreds of thousands of light-years, far into the galaxy’s outer reaches. The jet carries the energy outward, and the gas lights up along its path."

The findings also offer a new way for scientists to test the impact of black hole jets on galaxies.

The team's research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

New research suggests that mysterious Little Red Dots discovered in the early universe may actually be overfeeding supermassive black holes, killing two metaphorical birds with one stone.

While the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has undoubtedly improved our understanding of the cosmos immensely in its four years of operation, the $10 billion NASA instrument has also delivered some problems with our understanding of the universe.

Primary among these quirks in our understanding of the cosmos is the discovery of supermassive black holes with masses billions of times that of the sun that exist in the universe before it was 1 billion years old. That is before any black hole should have had a chance to grow to such monstrous masses via mergers or ordinary feeding. Arguably even more perplexing is the observation of so-called "Little Red Dots", objects that are found 600 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang but disappear before the universe is 1.5 billion years old.

Among the scientists tackling the nature of so-called Little Red Dots and the presence of supermassive black holes in the early universe is a team that has found both objects emerge naturally from simulations of the conditions found in the early universe. The team also found a connection between these two mysteries.

"The most exciting result is that objects resembling Little Red Dots emerge naturally in our cosmological simulations," team leader Sunmyon Chon of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Germany, told Space.com. "Massive black holes form and grow extremely rapidly, and during this growth they become surrounded by a very dense and optically thick gas envelope. This naturally produces several of the characteristic properties of observed Little Red Dots."

The team's research was published on Sept. 16 in the journal Nature.

How do overfeeding black holes connect to Little Red Dots

Running their cosmological simulation, Chon and colleagues uncovered a connection between Little Red Dots and massive black holes that relates to how the latter feed on matter.

"When a black hole is supplied with gas at an extremely high rate, the gas cannot simply disappear into the black hole immediately. A large amount accumulates around it and forms a dense, optically thick structure due to the angular momentum," Chon explained. "In a sense, we are seeing an extremely overfed black hole wrapped in its own fuel."

The researcher added that the glow of Little Red Dots comes from the fact that electromagnetic radiation produced near the black hole has to pass through this envelope of black hole fuel. This leads to the wavelengths of that radiation being changed, with the result being a compact object with a very red spectrum and broad hydrogen emission lines — key characteristics of Little Red Dots.

This overfeeding could explain how black holes reached such huge masses before ordinary feeding and merger processes should have allowed such growth. As for why this could happen in the early universe but doesn't happen today, the team also has a solution.

"The early universe provided an extraordinary supply of gas. Galaxies were growing very rapidly, and large amounts of dense gas were continuously flowing into their centers," Chon said. "In our simulations, strong radiation from nearby star-forming galaxies also plays an important role. It suppresses star formation in neighboring clouds, allowing a large amount of gas to accumulate before it finally collapses. This first creates supermassive stars, which then collapse into massive black-hole seeds.

"These black holes are therefore born in environments with an enormous reservoir of dense gas already available to feed them."

Answering the question of how supermassive black holes grew so big so fast is satisfying for the team. After all, it was the primary reason for the simulation being created.

"In our simulation, the process begins with supermassive stars reaching several hundred thousand solar masses. They collapse after roughly two million years and leave behind massive black-hole seeds. Because these seeds are already very massive and are born in gas-rich environments, they can then grow extremely rapidly," Chon said. "So Little Red Dots may actually be showing us some of the missing stages in the formation of the first supermassive black holes."

As satisfying as this is, the team's research doesn't answer every puzzle surrounding the JWST's observations of the early universe or Little Red Dots.

Why did these cosmic dinosars go extinct?

As mentioned above, one of the biggest puzzles surrounding Little Red Dots is the question of why they are absent in the last 11 billion or so years of cosmic history. And that remains an open question.

"Our simulations do not yet explain why Little Red Dots seem to disappear at later cosmic times. This is still a big mystery," Chon said. "I think understanding this cosmic evolution will be an important next step for both simulations and observations."

The fact that the simulation didn't answer all questions about Little Red Dots isn't too surprising to the team. In fact, they weren't expecting these curious objects to emerge in simulations at all.

"We originally designed these simulations to investigate the formation of massive black-hole seeds in the early universe," Chon explained. "We did not design them to produce Little Red Dots. But once the black holes formed and began growing, we found that they naturally became surrounded by dense gas and developed properties remarkably similar to Little Red Dots."

That wasn't the only surprise the simulation delivered. The team found that something that had previously been considered a rather exotic theoretical possibility emerged naturally from the evolution of the simulated universe.

"Another surprising result was that what forms around these rapidly growing black holes can be regarded as a type of quasi-star — a black hole embedded in a massive, optically thick gaseous envelope," Chon continued. "Our simulations showed for the first time that such a quasi-star-like system can form naturally in a cosmological simulation."

The next step for the team is to determine if the formation of overmassive black holes and Little Red Dots occurs in the simulation when environmental conditions of the early universe are varied. The researchers also intend to make more detailed predictions that can be compared to observations made by the JWST.

"Observations of Little Red Dots are progressing extremely quickly," Chon concluded. "As theorists, our challenge now is to make predictions at the same pace so that we can use these new observations to determine what these remarkable objects really are."

Most people never forget their first home, carrying their memories with them as they travel. New research suggests that this adage may be true for wandering black holes too. That's because it seems that rogue black holes that break away from their cosmic homes may carry with them the histories of the galaxies they may eventually escape.

These rogue black holes can be displaced when their home galaxies collide and merge. This begins journeys of billions of years that carry these black holes far from the point at which they formed. This process can be even more pronounced in smaller galaxies in which the gravitational influence is weaker, and the black holes are less likely to be strongly bound to the galactic center.

Scientists have known that the activity of supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies strongly influences the evolution of their host galaxies, but these findings indicate that though rogue black holes may be less influential, they may be important witnesses to the processes that shape galaxies.

"Our results show that considering wandering black holes, in addition to centered black holes, is essential for understanding the origins and dynamics of massive black holes and the histories of their host galaxies," team leader Emma Jane Weller of Yale University said in a statement.

Evidence of 'heavy seeds' in the early universe

There is currently some debate regarding how black holes first started growing in the infant cosmos. Some scientists suggest that the first massive stars died and collapsed to create smaller black holes or "light seeds." Others theorize that black hole growth gets a head start when dense patches in vast clouds of gas and dust directly collapse to create much more massive black holes, or so-called "heavy seeds."

If wandering black holes carry with them a record of their birth, then they could help settle the light seed vs. heavy seed debate.

"What is exciting about our findings is that black holes seem to remember more than the circumstances of their birth," team member Priyamvada Natarajan of Yale said. "Their present-day locations carry the imprint of everything that has happened to their host galaxies. By separating black holes at galactic centers from those that are wandering, we can begin to disentangle these two histories."

To do this, the team turned to a cosmological simulation called ASTRID, which is capable of tracing roughly 13.5 billion years of cosmic history, modeling the interplay between dark matter scaffolding, gas dynamics, and star formation right back to just 300 million years after the Big Bang.

Using ASTRID, the team modelled galaxies with masses between 10 million and 1 billion times that of the sun tracking their evolution over around 12.6 billion years. ASTRID has a strength that was important to this particular investigation. It doesn't pin black holes down to the heart of their galaxies; instead, it allows them the leeway to roam.

The team confirmed that black holes were more likely to wander in low-mass galaxies, also finding that such galaxies seem to retain information about their initial seed population even after billions of years of growth and collisions and mergers with other galaxies. They also found that low-mass galaxies with a central black hole stopped forming stars before those with wandering black holes.

"Some of the universe's most revealing black holes may be the ones that have wandered away. Black holes are remarkable cosmic archivists," Natarajan said. "Their abundance tells us something about how they were born, while their locations preserve a record of how their galaxies were assembled."

By teaming this approach with X-ray, radio, optical, and infrared astronomical observations, scientists could get closer than ever before to understanding the origins of black holes.

"Each of these methods can probe different parts of the population," Weller concluded. "By combining observations with the results from simulations, we may be able to identify the imprints of black hole formation and galaxy evolution."

The team's research was published on Sept. 7 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Astronomers have discovered the first microblazar in the Milky Way, a black hole-powered particle accelerator that is blasting near-light-speed plasma jets at Earth.

The system known as IRAS 18293−0941 is located around 12,000 light-years away and consists of a black hole feeding on material stripped from a massive companion star, which it orbits every 11 Earth days. Some of this material escapes the black hole after being channeled to its poles, from where it is blasted out as twin jets travelling at near light-speed. The difference between a blazar and a microblazar is that the former consists of a supermassive black hole with a mass millions or billions of times that of the sun, feeding on surrounding matter and firing jets directly at Earth. In the latter, and thus in IRAS 18293−0941, the feeding object is a much smaller stellar-mass black hole with a mass of up to a few hundred times that of our star.

If you think such a system should be highly conspicuous, you would be right. Yet, despite microquasars having been theorized to exist within our galaxy for around three decades, this one has avoided detection because it is blocked by a thick wall of interstellar gas and dust.

"Everything about IRAS 18293−0941 was hiding in plain sight," said Josep Martí of the University of Jaén, Spain. "It sits behind so much dust that it is essentially invisible in ordinary optical images. It was catalogued decades ago and then more or less forgotten."

A flicker of a discovery

Sometimes in science, big discoveries begin with just a tiny hint. That is definitely the case with the unveiling of IRAS 18293−0941.

Astronomers first got a hint of its existence when they noticed the light of the system's star was flickering. This revealed the 11.4-day orbit of a companion black hole, which scientists realized they were observing almost face-on.

Further observations made in radio waves then revealed the existence of a one-sided jet, with the other jet not visible because it isn't pointed almost directly toward us, but directly away from Earth.

High-resolution observations made using the network of radio telescopes called the European VLBI Network (EVN) confirmed the orientation of the jet and that it originated from the system IRAS 18293−0941 and not from a distant galaxy that happens to lie in the same direction as the star the team was studying.

"This was the moment the result became solid," explained Benito Marcote from the Joint Institute for VLBI in the Netherlands. "The resolution achieved by the EVN position together with the known position of the star from the Gaia satellite confirmed it: the jet belongs to the stellar system."

Though the jet travelling away from us isn't observable directly, astronomers did manage to detect its effects using the MeerKAT radio observatory in South Africa. This revealed a 100 light-year-wide bubble where the jet strikes interstellar gas and dust. At one edge of that bubble is a "hotspot" where the collision between the jet and the material is accelerating particles, warming dust, and causing the hydrogen gas to glow.

This point is also the source of high-energy gamma-rays, each photon of which carries ten times the energy of particles accelerated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), Earth's largest and most powerful particle accelerator.

The jet carries 500,000 times the energy radiated by the sun and explains the mystery of how feeding black holes become such powerful cosmic particle accelerators and generate such high-energy gamma-ray photons.

The elegance is that the accelerator engine and the target are two different objects, tens of parsecs apart," team member Pedro Luque-Escamilla of the University of Jaén said. "The jet does the accelerating. The cloud does the shining."

The discovery of a microblazar much closer to us than any fully-fledged blazar, found in the heart of distant active galaxies, offers a unique opportunity to study how such systems evolve.

Additionally, this system presents the chance to examine how jets pour energy from feeding black holes to their surrounding galaxies.

The team's research is available as a preprint on the repository site arXiv and has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Black holes come in a vast array of sizes. There are the stellar-mass black holes with a few times the mass of the sun — and then there are the supermassive black holes with billions of times the mass of our star that dominate the hearts of all large galaxies. However, new research suggests the "burps" that black holes emit when feeding on unfortunate stars seem to be remarkably similar — no matter their size.

For many years, scientists have looked at black holes and theorized that despite these objects' immense differences in size and mass, the underlying physics should be the same. That has been incredibly difficult to test, however. This is because supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies evolve over thousands, or sometimes even millions, of years.

A way around this hurdle, though, is to study tidal disruption events, or TDEs. During these destructive events, the feeding process is compressed into a timescale of a few years, making it observable by human beings during our brief lives.

TDEs occur when a star's orbit brings it too close to a black hole's immense gravitational influence. That proximity causes immense tidal forces within the star. These forces essentially squash the star horizontally while also stretching it vertically, a process called spaghettification.

The plasma pasta then wraps around the black hole like spaghetti around a fork, but just like eating good pasta can be a messy affair, black holes spill a massive amount of stellar food. This material is then channeled to the poles of black holes, from where it is blasted out as near-light-speed jets that can extend for thousands of light-years. This is sometimes referred to as a "burp." Yet the mechanism that powers these jets remains somewhat mysterious, especially when there is a delay between black holes snacking and launching jets.

"Why do some supermassive black holes blast out radio jets right after shredding a star, while others just sit there looking completely dormant, only to suddenly fire up their jets months or even years later?" research author Andrew Mummery of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) School of Natural Sciences said in a statement. "We really wanted to figure out this massive puzzle."

After all, black hole jets are responsible for shaping entire galaxies.

Mummery and study co-author Adelle J. Goodwin were in a bar in Madrid, Spain, during a conference when they realized that the rules that apply to stellar-mass black hole jets also must apply to supermassive black hole jets.

To test this idea, the duo turned to telescope data across a wide range of electromagnetic radiation to study a sample of 20 TDEs. Of these, they found half could be studied to reliably model the feeding and outflow-blasting behavior of black holes.

What Mummery and Goodwin found was that jet-launching occurs in two distinct phases: the first, perhaps unsurprisingly, occurs when the supermassive black hole is feeding at its most extreme rate. The second phase occurs much later, potentially years after the star has been ripped apart. That is when the supermassive black hole's feeding has dropped to 2% of what is known as the Eddington limit.

The Eddington limit occurs just before radiation from an accreting source becomes so intense that the pressure it generates pushes away further matter that could be consumed. The 2% threshold is significant because that is the point at which stellar-mass black holes launch their own jets. That means no matter the scale of the black hole, a few times the mass of the sun or a billion, jet formation is the same across black holes.

This is an exciting prospect for astronomers, because it means that when looking at future TDEs, they will be able to roughly predict when jets will be launched.

"We hope that our work will pave the way for even more profound discoveries about our universe," Mummery said.

The team's research was published on Thursday (Sept. 17) in the journal Nature Astronomy

When we think about black holes, we tend to imagine dominant cosmic titans that consume everything around them. However, for many years scientists have mused over the existence of far more diminutive, but short-lived black holes. Using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator, scientists have been on the hunt for quantum black holes that are smaller than atoms. This is a tricky proposition, as these black holes would have a lifetime as diminutive as their size.

The discovery of such objects could help solve some of the mysteries surrounding the structure of space and time, united as a four-dimensional entity called "spacetime."

It could also help researchers develop a theory of quantum gravity that unites the thus far incompatible theories of general relativity, our best description of gravity, and quantum physics, the framework that describes the universe on scales smaller than atoms.

"Had we found evidence, we could have begun to directly study quantum gravity," Tamas Vami, a researcher at the LHC experiment Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), said in a statement. "It's a step toward unifying all of the known fundamental forces, which has been a goal of physicists for more than a century."

Unfortunately, this search has thus far been fruitless, but that doesn't mean that it has been useless. Null results in this case redefine the search parameters for these tiny black holes and help perfect methods that can be used to hunt for new particles beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

"It's not a dead-end," Incandela Lab researcher Danyi Zhang explained. "The result is an exclusion limit, which is a real, publishable statement: 'If this thing existed with these properties, we'd have seen it. We didn't, so we can rule it out here.'

"That's genuine knowledge about how the universe works."

The hunt for a new paradigm

The answers to the universe's most tantalizing mysteries are theorized to lie in physics beyond the Standard Model. New physics may only manifest at high-energy levels, the sort of energies that the LHC generates by slamming together protons at near light speed.

Thus far, this new physics has failed to manifest at the LHC, but this only makes scientists more keen to hunt for what could represent a paradigm shift on a scale comparable to the development of Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Scientists also think that quantum black holes could emerge from the trillions of proton collisions occurring in the LHC. That has often been misinterpreted as the potential for the LHC to create a potential Armageddon-inducing stable black hole, but the truth is that if the world's most powerful particle accelerator did create a black hole, it would evaporate instantly, certainly too rapidly to gobble up Earth.

A classic astrophysical black hole forms when a massive star collapses under the influence of its own gravity, causing its core to crunch down to an infinitesimally small point. To make a quantum black hole, on the other hand, energy would have to be compressed to a tiny volume.

One theory suggests that this compression could occur in extra "hidden" dimensions of the type required by string theory and other extensions to standard physics that offer a grand unified theory. These hidden dimensions could also explain why gravity is the weakest of the universe's four fundamental forces, something that has puzzled scientists for decades. If this proposal is correct, gravity would "leak" into these extra dimensions in which it becomes substantially stronger.

The extremely high energy generated at the LHC corresponds to distances so small that they are to an atom what an atom is to our bodies. The perfect scale to hunt for quantum black holes.

How do you detect a disppearing black hole

If a black hole disappears instantly, detecting it directly would be impossible even for sophisticated detectors at the LHC. An easier route is to detect such an object via the particles and energy released when it decays.

The decay of a quantum black hole would leave a very unique signature in terms of its shape and energy.

"You form a black hole, and it immediately disintegrates. But it has a very spherical decay signature, lots of things going in all directions," Zhang said. "We know that black holes are very high energy. So we basically just take the energy of these particles that are decay products of whatever was created in the collision and sum them together. And if the sum is large enough, we can say that this is the region where we are likely to find the signal."

Zhang and colleagues used a new technique to scour data collected by the CMS detector up to energies of 12 Tera-electron volts (TeV). They failed to find evidence of quantum black holes or hidden dimensions, but they aren't disheartened.

"Theories don’t predict one exact answer; they predict a whole range of places a particle could be hiding," Zhang said. "Each search clears out part of that range and says 'not here,' and over time the map of where new physics could still be shrinks."

That's a proven technique, especially for LHC research. That process of elimination led to the discovery of the Higgs boson back in 2012. And the search for quantum black holes is definitely worthwhile. It could soothe a headache that has bothered physicists since the development of general relativity and quantum physics during the early years of the 20th century.

As more data is collected and higher-energy domains are explored, the probability of finding a quantum black hole via its products increases. And that would put researchers tantalizingly close to the unification of quantum physics and general relativity.

"We have two big theories that describe nature. If you want to describe things that are small, you go to quantum field theory. We have the Standard Model to describe all the particles, and it performs exceptionally well in practice. And when you go to the very, very big, you have general relativity that would describe how big and massive objects behave," Vami said, also explaining the difficulty in merging these theories emerges from the fact that the conditions at which they overlap would be rarefied..

"That's really hard to do because you don't often have a situation which is really tiny but also extremely heavy."

Quantum effects come into play at the edge of astrophysical black holes, but these effects are even more significant for the tiny black holes that would be created at the LHC.

For that reason, the hunt for quantum black holes is set to continue until research like this leaves these curious objects nowhere left to hide.

The team's research was published in the journal Progress in High Energy Physics.

Scientists have created a 27-year-long video reconstruction of the high-energy jets of a blazar, which is a supermassive black hole blasting plasma straight at Earth. The findings delivered some surprises.

The team primarily used data collected via a radio imaging technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI). It's the same technique the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) used to obtain humanity's first image of a black hole. Scientists have long been using VLBI to study jets erupting from the central regions of galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN), which are dominated by an engine consisting of a supermassive black hole that is greedily feasting on surrounding gas and dust. When AGNs are viewed from a distance, they are referred to as quasars; when the jets they blast are directed straight down our line of sight, they are called blazars.

Thus far, observations of blazars using VLBI have been limited because they have consisted of separate "snapshots" in time. That limits scientists' understanding of how the plasma in these jets flows.

"Blazar jets travel at nearly the speed of light, far beyond the galaxy from which they come. They are accelerated by the strong magnetic fields surrounding the black hole and its accretion disk, but the exact mechanism that produces them is still unclear," team member and research lead author Marianna Foschi of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) told Space.com. "In general, I'm interested in black holes and the processes that surround them, such as jets, because that is the most extreme regime in which we can test general relativity, the best and most elegant theory we have so far to describe gravity and spacetime."

Reconstructing a blazar jet delievers a shock

This new "video" of blazar 3C 345, located around 5.5 billion light-years away, was created using a sophisticated video reconstruction algorithm called Kine, which employs a deep learning model to map the brightness distribution of the blazar in space and time.

"This model consists of a simple neural network which learns and enforces spatial and temporal correlations in the video, finding the right amount of 'smoothness' of the figure," Foschi said. "Using Kine and recovering a full video instead of individual frames, we were able to achieve two orders of magnitude better dynamic range and four times better resolution compared to previous images."

In addition to having better image quality, Foschi explained that the team's video reconstruction is also continuous in time, allowing for the use of standard video processing tools to track the motion of every point in the jet.

"This is a significant step forward compared to any previous analysis of jet dynamics because past methods could only approximate the jet to a collection of large discrete features and then track the position of such features," Foschi said.

As you might imagine for such a significant step forward in the study of blazars, this video reconstruction delivered some significant surprises for the researchers.

Thus far, the general consensus about jets flowing from supermassive black holes is that the bright regions are caused by a traveling shock front and that the speed of the shock front would be noticeably greater than the speed of the rest of the jet's plasma. However, this doesn't seem to be the case with the jets erupting from blazar 3C 345.

"It was surprising for us to find that the speed at which the bright compact components travel along the jet is almost the same as the speed of the bulk flow of the rest of the plasma in the jet," Foschi said. "We analyzed only one blazar, though, so our results don't put into question the shock interpretation in general but only in the specific case of 3C 345."

The team now intends to apply Kine to observations of other blazars, hoping that this may shed light on the shock model and on how plasma moves through the jet, and what mechanisms are causing that motion.

"It is the first and only imaging method that can produce reliable and high-quality videos from such a high number of observations in a short time," Foschi said, "so it can be applied systematically to many sources for which we have decades of observations."

The team's research was published in August in the journal Nature.

Astronomers have studied nine local galaxies to discover how shock waves from the galaxies' central supermassive black holes sculpt star formation.

The team of researchers studied galaxies with active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at their hearts. These are bright and turbulent regions powered by central engine supermassive black holes with masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun that are feeding on copious amounts of gas and dust. As energy flows out of these regions and strikes surrounding gas clouds, called the interstellar medium, it generates powerful and fast-moving "shocks."

These shocks are also known as "AGN feedback," and they pump vast amounts of energy into their surroundings, shunting around gas and dust that is the raw material for star formation. While this feedback has often been attributed with ending star formation in galaxies, scientists have long suspected that this process can also drive star formation and therefore the growth and evolution of galaxies. This new research maps out how that happens.

"We're seeing that black holes are not just consuming material at the centers of galaxies, but they're actively reshaping their surroundings," team member Lisa Kewley of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian said in a statement. "This work helps us understand a complex feedback cycle that plays an important role in galaxy evolution."

Supermassive black holes as stellar sculptors

All large galaxies are thought to have supermassive black holes residing at their cores. But not all of these black holes are active. For instance, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), at the heart of the Milky Way, is relatively dormant. Its feeding habits are the equivalent of a human being eating one grain of rice every million years.

Other supermassive black holes are surrounded by large amounts of gas and dust and swirling flattened clouds called "accretion disks" that feed them. The immense gravitational influence of these black holes generates incredible amounts of friction in the accretion disk, causing the objects to glow brightly as AGNs.

These AGN emissions are bolstered by the fact that supermassive black holes are notoriously messy eaters, channeling matter they don't eat toward their poles. From there, this matter is blasted out as powerful "burps" consisting of twin jets of plasma that can stretch out for thousands of light-years. This means supermassive black holes and AGNs have a considerable influence on their surroundings.

The team used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) to study AGNs in which supermassive black holes are actively accreting matter.

"Once we resolved them, we could see that they not only accrete things, but they also eject things," Peixin Zhu of the Center for Astrophysics said in the statement. "The injection and accretion are linked with each other."

The team performed a 3-dimensional analysis to identify three different aspects of AGNs and their surroundings: the radiation flowing from the AGN, the excitation of the surrounding interstellar medium by shocks, and star formation.

They found that arcs and rings of star formation tended to appear at distances between 2,600 and 20,000 light-years from the centers of galaxies. The researchers also observed cones of radiation extending out from the accretion disks of AGNs, where fast shocks both rippled through central regions and traveled perpendicular to the radiation cones.

This shock behavior is consistent with models of interactions between AGN jets and the interstellar medium. The team thinks that in galaxies with less powerful jets, black hole winds also contribute to shock generation.

"The most interesting phenomenon about shocks is that they always go perpendicular to where the black hole's injected outflows go," Peixin said. "It is very common, and we see it consistently appearing across the whole nine galaxies."

The research demonstrates that actively feeding black holes are engaged in a complex cycle of accretion and outflow that drives their interaction with their host galaxies.

By separating the different aspects of this process, the scientists behind these findings have provided a clearer picture than ever before of this cycle and how it influences star formation.

The team's research was published on Monday (Sept. 14) in The Astrophysical Journal.

The way in which the ghostly particles known as neutrinos can switch from one kind to another might help explain which stars explode and which collapse to form black holes, a new study finds.

These new findings might also help explain a number of other cosmic mysteries, such as why astronomers have detected fewer supernovas than expected.

When a massive star finally depletes its store of fuel, without nuclear reactions driving the star to expand, its core will implode under its own weight. The extraordinarily high heat and pressure resulting from this collapse will crush protons and electrons together, forming neutrons. This in turn releases a flood of ghostly particles known as neutrinos.

Generally, neutrinos barely interact with all forms of matter. However, when a massive star's heart collapses, it releases a staggering amount of neutrinos — enough for many to slam into and heat the layers just outside the star's core. In some cases, such neutrino heating can lead the rest of the star to explode as a supernova, and leave behind an extraordinarily dense cluster of neutrons known as a neutron star. In other cases, neutrino heating fails to lead to an explosion, and the star collapses, forming a black hole.

"Neutrinos are not a side detail in supernovas," study co-author Mariam Gogilashvili, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, told Space.com. "They carry away about 99% of the energy released when the core collapses, and a small change in how they behave can decide the fate of the whole star."

Much remains uncertain about which massive stars explode to birth neutron stars and which collapse to form black holes. Uncovering these details could help shed light on a wide range of activity in the cosmos, like the way in which dying stars filled the universe with the kind of matter that nowadays makes up everything from planets to people.

To yield insights on these mysteries, scientists investigated the role the strange nature of neutrinos might play. There are three "flavors" of neutrino — electron, muon and tau — which are named after the kind of particle each flavor generates if they ever collide with matter. In 1998, physicists discovered that neutrinos can "oscillate," or change from one flavor to another, a finding that won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics. (There are three corresponding flavors of antineutrino that can similarly change flavor.)

Both muon and tau neutrinos (and antineutrinos) are much less likely to interact with regular matter than electron neutrinos (and antineutrinos). This suggests neutrino flavor change might potentially influence how much neutrinos can heat up matter in a dying star and trigger an explosion.

Previously, scientists thought flavor change would only play a negligible role in the way dying stars collapsed. However, over the past decade, physicists have found that given the astoundingly large number of neutrinos that dying stars generate, many neutrinos are concentrated enough to interact with each other, triggering flavor changes within the core of the collapsing star.

In the new study, the researchers simulated the collapse of 195 stars, ranging in size from nine to 120 solar masses. They analyzed different assumptions about where neutrino flavor conversion occurs in the cores of collapsing stars.

The scientists found that neutrino flavor change might make dying massive stars significantly less likely to explode as supernovas and form neutron stars, and more likely to collapse to create black holes.

"What surprised us most was that the stars between 16 and 30 times the mass of the sun, many of which explode comfortably in our standard simulations, turned out to be particularly sensitive to neutrino physics," study co-author Irene Tamborra, a particle astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen's Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, told Space.com "A large number of them fail once flavor conversion is included."

These new findings might help solve a number of longstanding mysteries. For instance, astronomers have detected fewer supernovas than theoretical predictions — neutrino flavor change might help explain these findings, Gogilashvili said. Neutrino flavor change might also help reveal why the biggest red supergiant stars appear to vanish without generating supernova explosions — they may collapse as black holes.

Moreover, the scientists estimated that neutrino flavor change might yield less massive neutron stars. This could help explain why astronomers have detected neutron stars with lower masses than previously theoretically predicted, Tamborra said.

In the future, the scientists want to include more realistic models of neutrino behavior in 3-D computer simulations of massive stars, so neutrino flavor change starts and evolves over time as the stars die.

Gogilashvili and Tamborra detailed their findings in September in the journal Physical Review D.

Though their origins may be shrouded in mystery, fast radio bursts (FRBs) could be used to probe some of the universe's biggest puzzles. This includes probing the nature of dark matter, the invisible sort of matter that somehow dominates the universe, and dark energy, the mysterious force causing the expansion of our universe to accelerate. They could even shed light on the mysteries of neutrinos, or "ghost particles." Let's dive into how.

FRBs are brief but intense blasts of radio waves currently thought to erupt from rapidly rotating dead stars with the universe's strongest magnetic fields, called magnetars. As FRBs travel billions of light-years to reach Earth, they pass through dense clouds of gas and dust in galaxies. This "cosmic fog" changes the original FRB signal. What this means is these blasts of radio waves carry the fingerprints of how matter in the universe is distributed.

Mapping the distribution and "clumpiness" of ordinary matter in galaxies can then help trace the distribution of dark matter, the effect of dark energy and the mass of neutrinos.

"We've established that FRBs are a leading probe of the distribution of matter in the universe," team leader Kritti Sharma, a graduate student working with Vikram Ravi, a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and also part of the team, said in a statement. "These FRB data can be used to enhance cosmology experiments that are trying to answer questions about dark matter, dark energy, and the mass of neutrinos."

For this research, Ravi and Sharma analyzed a sample of about 100 FRBs. This represents the first time scientists have used FRBs to directly measure the impact of so-called "feedback" from galaxies on the clumpiness of matter in the large-scale regions between galaxies.

Cosmic ghosts and the dark universe

Ordinary matter, composed of atoms made up of electrons, protons and neutrons, accounts for just around 5% of the universe's energy/matter budget despite comprising stars, planets, moons, our bodies, next door's cat and everything we see around us on a day-to-day basis.

Of this budget, the other 95% is composed of dark energy (68%) and dark matter (27%). It's little wonder that scientists are very keen to better understand these two aspects of the cosmos, sometimes collectively referred to as the "dark universe."

Things get even more murky when considering how, of that 5%, the second most abundant particles in the universe, aside from particles of light or photons, are neutrinos. These get their nickname of "ghost particles" because they interact with other matter particles so infrequently that approximately 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second without leaving any trace. This is possible because neutrinos are virtually massless, and scientists are keen to accurately measure the mass of these cosmic ghosts.

These three mysterious elements of the cosmos have played a vital role in the evolution of large-scale cosmic structures like galaxies and galaxy clusters. That means, in turn, that measuring the clustering of matter can reveal details about the aspects of the universe that influenced that clustering.

However, to do that, scientists also have to understand how other factors smooth out cosmic clumpiness. That includes the energy pumped out from the hearts of galaxies by feeding supermassive black holes, a type of cosmic feedback that smooths out clumpy cosmic matter lying outside galaxies.

"The feedback process thins the gas around the galaxies, redistributing matter across vast distances. It smooths out clumps of matter in a way that looks astonishingly similar to what massive neutrinos do, or what dark energy or dark matter theories predict," Ravi said. "Unless scientists can independently measure this contribution from feedback, they can't tell these effects apart."

That's where FRBs come in.

The researchers found that, while galactic feedback does indeed smooth surrounding material, making it less clumpy, the effect is weaker than has previously been measured.

"Our analysis of FRBs reveals how gas ejected by astrophysical feedback suppresses cosmic structure," team member Elisabeth Krause of the University of Arizona said in the statement. "This is amazing considering we only had about 100 FRBs in our sample. It's only the beginning."

The investigation of the universe with FRBs could get a major boost in 2029 when Caltech's Deep Synoptic Array (DSA) begins operating in Nevada. This powerful radio telescope is expected to find tens of thousands of FRBs, a major boon for cosmology.

The team's research was published on Tuesday (Sept. 8) in the journal Nature Astronomy.

A "forbidden" merger between two massive black holes may not have been quite as impossible as previously thought. That's according to new research that suggests the black holes involved were smaller than expected.

On Nov. 23, 2023, the gravitational wave detector LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detected tiny ripples in spacetime caused by the merger of two black holes. What was incredible about this signal, designated GW231123, was that it seemed to be the result of a black hole with 140 times the mass of the sun colliding with another that holds 100 solar masses.

This raised eyebrows among researchers because usual models of stellar evolution struggle to account for such massive black holes, especially ones that seemed to be spinning as fast as these two. While scientists have been attempting to explain how such an odd black hole binary could form. The team behind this new research suggests it doesn't need to be explained at all. They think that the masses of these black holes were an illusion.

The key to this illusion is a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, first predicted by Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity, which also first predicted the existence of gravitational waves. This theory says objects with mass cause the curvature of space and time, united as a four-dimensional entity called "spacetime." The more mass an object possesses, the greater the curvature, and because gravity arises from this curvature, the greater the gravitational influence.

Gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background object passes a massive foreground object. The foreground object can warp the fabric of spacetime in such a way that the light's path is curved. This means light from the same background source can reach Earth at different times, depending on how much that light was diverted.

This difference in travel time can magnify a background source, and it has been used to great effect to observe distant and ancient galaxies ordinarily too faint to be seen.

This research team thinks the effect also applies to gravitational waves, suggesting the signal GW231123 is an example of gravitationally lensed ripples in spacetime that made the black holes appear larger than they actually are.

"Like light, gravitational waves can also be deflected, magnified and split into multiple signals by massive objects," team member Miguel Zumalacárregui, group leader in the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity Department at the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI), said in a statement. "For gravitational waves, diffraction and interference effects give us an additional way to identify and study lensed signals."

To investigate this possibility, the team developed a mathematical model of gravitational lensing and created software powerful and fast enough to analyze it.

"If we assume that GW231123 was deflected and distorted by a compact object of about 190 to 850 solar masses — or by an extended structure such as a globular cluster — we can understand the observed high masses," said team member Srashti Goyal, who was based at the AEI when conducting the research. "Moreover, the lensing interpretation does not require unusually high spins."

When the team modeled the event with that consideration factored in, they found the merger involved a system with a mass of 140 solar masses, rather than the 240-solar-mass system initially theorized.

The team doesn't quite know what massive object is responsible for lensing the gravitational wave signal GW231123. But no matter what it is, if the team is correct, the lens could be something quite special.

"The nature of the lens remains a major mystery in our analysis, as individual compact lenses with 100 to 1,000 solar masses should be exceedingly rare," Zumalacárregui said. "Future work will need to establish whether such lenses can form, or whether an ensemble of lighter objects, including stars, can explain this event."

The team can't yet conclusively say if GW231123 is the first gravitationally lensed gravitational wave signal. Finding future signals of the sort will require upgrades to the sensitivity of detectors like LIGO.

Though even before that happens, the research does point to the utility of gravitational wave astronomy to study some of the universe's most violent events.

The team's research was published on August 25 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

In the four years that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been making observations of the early universe, it has been delivering one scientific milestone after another. However, the $10 billion telescope has also left astronomers with a massive problem  — literally.

The JWST has been routinely spotting supermassive black holes in the early universe that, at hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun, are too big to have grown to such monstrous sizes before the universe was even 1 billion years old. These cosmic titans are also too massive in comparison to the masses of their small host galaxies, challenging what astronomers know about the relationships between supermassive black holes and their galactic homes that are usually observed in the modern universe.

Now, new research suggests this isn't such a massive problem after all. The team behind this research thinks that it is all a matter of perspective, and that these early supermassive black holes aren't as monstrous as scientists have estimated.

"We estimate masses of roughly one to ten million solar masses, compared with the tens or hundreds of millions previously inferred," team leader Alessandro Trinca of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) Astronomical Observatory of Rome told Space.com. "These are still enormous objects, comparable to the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way, or a few times larger, but they lie at the lower end of the supermassive black hole population rather than among the most extreme examples.

"Importantly, these masses are much more consistent with the small galaxies that host them."

The answer to this puzzle may lie in missing X-rays

While considering the mystery of "overmassive" black holes in the early universe, Trinca and colleagues picked up on another puzzle associated with these objects.

To reach such sizes, these black holes must be voraciously feeding on surrounding gas and dust. Such feeding black holes and the cosmic larders of gas and dust that surround them are usually extremely bright emitters of X-rays. But this doesn't seem to be the case with the supermassive black holes in the early universe seen by the JWST. The team looked at 14 X-ray-silent supermassive black holes, finding that there is another way of considering this lack of emission.

"Almost none of them are detected in X-rays, even in very deep observations with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory," Trinca said. "We interpreted this lack of X-rays as a clue rather than a problem. By incorporating it into our analysis, we find that these objects are likely much less massive than previously estimated. This brings their estimated masses into better agreement with the properties of their host galaxies."

This led Trinca and the team to another conclusion: these early supermassive black holes may not be as massive as previously theorized, but they are feeding even more rapidly than was thought.

If feeding supermassive black holes blast out a lot of X-rays, then it might seem somewhat counterintuitive that ravenously feeding black holes could be X-ray "quiet."

Trinca explains that this apparent contradiction is related to what happens when a black hole accretes matter at extremely high rates. The disk of gas around the black hole becomes geometrically thick, forming a donut-like structure with a narrow funnel along the rotation axis. The hot inner region that would normally produce strong X-rays becomes surrounded by this thick disk.

"As the X-rays escape, they are repeatedly scattered by the surrounding gas, losing energy before they can emerge. As a result, the black hole appears much fainter in X-rays than we would normally expect," Trinca continued. "Therefore, the lack of X-rays is not unexpected in this scenario; it is actually a prediction of the model.

"In addition, this very high feeding might help explain how these black holes could already have grown to millions of times the sun's mass when the universe was only a few hundred million years old."

Out-eating Eddington

One of the reasons that supermassive black holes are so troubling in the early universe is the fact that they grow by consuming matter and through merging with other black holes. However, there exists a limit to how rapidly a black hole, or any astronomical body, can gather or "accrete" matter.

Called the "Eddington limit," this exists because the more matter a body accretes, the more radiation it blasts out. So as the disk around a feeding black hole gathers enough mass to feed a rapidly growing black hole, it should emit so much radiation that it pushes away more matter, preventing it from being replenished.

Eventually this cuts off the food supply to the black hole and curtails its growth. However, this research suggests that supermassive black holes can enter brief phases of "super-Eddington" feeding.

"If these black holes are up to thirty times less massive than previously estimated, there is much less mass to build up within the available time, and their growth history becomes much less extreme," Trinca said. "Instead of requiring continuous, uninterrupted growth over hundreds of millions of years, the picture becomes one of shorter episodes of very rapid accretion, which is exactly the kind of behavior we might expect in the gas-rich and dynamically active galaxies of the early universe."

Confirming the team's theory about bouts of extreme feeding for supermassive black holes will require astronomical evidence, which may be tough to obtain at least for now.

"The most direct test would be to study similar objects that are accreting very rapidly but are located at lower redshifts, where we can observe and characterize their environments in much greater detail. However, such objects are quite rare," Trinca said. "For the more distant population observed with JWST, future missions providing deeper X-ray observations and improved spectra will be of crucial importance and might potentially detect the weak X-ray emission predicted by this scenario."

The INAF researcher added that in the longer term, obtaining direct and independent measurements of black hole masses at progressively earlier cosmic times will provide the strongest test of the team's theory. For now, the research is a striking example of what scientists can do when they don't detect something, rather than when they make a positive detection.

"What was interesting was seeing how much information could be extracted from something we did not observe," Trinca concluded. "A non-detection may appear to be the least informative type of observation, but in this case the absence of X-rays provided a strong constraint and helped define the physical picture more clearly than the detections alone."

The team's research was published in the June edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Some stars encounter supermassive black holes and live to tell the tale. New research shows why the flares these encounters cause dim over repeated episodes, and it may be down to the way these stars spin and an escaping binary partner that leaves them to be a stellar snack for a black hole.

Some stars are unfortunate enough to encounter the supermassive black holes that sit at the heart of every galaxy, being subjected to immense tidal forces that turn them into a strand of stellar spaghetti, a process called "spaghettification." This plasma pasta wraps around the black hole and is gradually fed to it, with some former star stuff being ejected as near-light-speed jets. These occurrences are called tidal disruption events (TDEs).

However, other stars get a reprieve, passing close enough to a supermassive black hole for the cosmic titan to take a bite and strip off material, but not close enough to be fully destroyed. As the star orbits the supermassive black hole, it takes repeated "bites," with this stellar snacking called a repeating partial tidal disruption event (rpTDE).

Each incident causes a flare of light from the vicinity of the black hole, as would be expected from the brightening seen during a standard TDE. But a strange pattern has emerged in rpTDES; each successive flare can become dimmer. Scientists have struggled to explain this dimming for some time, but finally a team of researchers from Syracuse University may have solved this puzzle.

To reach an answer to black hole flare dimming, the team considered a factor that hadn't been thought of before: the spin of the star itself. This element explained the dimming of black hole flaring and also helped to explain why not all rpTDEs play out the same.

"We were puzzled by this for two years," team leader Ananya Bandopadhyay of Syracuse University said in a statement.

A new spin on stellar snacking

Bandopadhyay and colleagues previously determined that how much material a star loses during repeated rpTDE episodes depends partially on its internal structure, which in turn depends on its mass.

Bandopadhyay compares a low-mass star to a fluffy meringue, which makes it more susceptible to the tidal forces generated by the black hole, allowing more material to be stripped from deeper within the star.

In contrast, a high-mass star has a structure more like an onion. That means that when such a stellar body buzzes a black hole in a rpTDE, its outer layers are stripped, but its core resists the influence of the black hole. Thus, as that outer layer is whittled away, there is less and less material to be stripped away in subsequent episodes.

However, that alone can't fully account for the dimming of flares from four of the ten currently discovered rpTDEs, because of the influence the black hole has on the star as it passes.

The team's prior work had identified that during rpTDEs, supermassive black holes exert a torque on the passing star that causes the star to spin faster during each passage.

That means even though less material falls to the black hole during each passage, the star returns over shorter and shorter periods of time. That helps keep flaring consistently bright. Thus, a recipe for dimming requires a new ingredient.

Bandopadhyay determined that this element could be a star that was already spinning rapidly before its first encounter with a supermassive black hole.

If a star is already rapidly spinning when it first encounters a black hole, the torque experienced doesn't increase that spin much. And without that increase in spin, there is no shortening of periods between episodes, meaning less and less material being stripped would result in dimming.

Of course, that leaves another question: why would a star be spinning so rapidly in the first place?

Rogue stars could be the answer

The key to this mystery could lie in the fact that most stars don't orbit the centers of their galaxies where supermassive black holes dwell alone, instead existing in binary partnerships.

"It is also extremely difficult to 'bind' a star to a supermassive black hole so tightly that it orbits the black hole in a matter of months, and yet they seem to do so in rpTDEs," team member Eric Coughlin of Syracuse University said.

The loss of a partner star, could cause a stellar body to be tightly bound to a supermassive black hole, completing an orbit once every few months.

During a process called Hills capture, as a stellar binary orbits a supermassive black hole and the gravitational influence of the black hole rips the binary apart, ejecting one star while capturing the other.

If this stellar binary was particularly tight, with the stars closely orbiting each other, this ejection and capture process could leave the trapped star rapidly spinning on a tight orbit.

"This work demonstrates that each of these peculiarities can be explained by the same underlying phenomenon: the tidal destruction of a binary system and the capture of one of the stars," Coughlin said. "From a theoretical standpoint, this is a major step forward in our understanding of the physics at play in these systems."

The discovery may have implications closer to home too. Though the supermassive black hole of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), isn't currently involved in a rpTDE, it is orbited by many rapid stars. These findings may explain how they came to be there.

The team's research was published on August 18 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers have discovered a hitherto unseen population of so-called "radio galaxies" with fading "radio lobes." The discovery reveals what happens when the supermassive black hole engines that power these vast, blooming outflows of plasma stall. This discovery increases our understanding of the life cycles of galaxies.

The team behind this research studied 14 candidates for faded or remnant radio galaxies found in a region of the sky over Earth, studied intensely by the XMM-Newton X-ray spacecraft, called the XMM–Newton Large-Scale Structure (XMM–LSS) field.

Radio galaxies are extremely bright in radio waves and feature vast lobes of gas that can stretch out for millions of light-years. Remnant radio galaxies represent the final stage in the evolution of radio galaxies, at which point the jets from the galaxies' central regions, or active galactic nuclei (AGNs) powered by feeding supermassive black holes, have switched off. Therefore, these jets can no longer replenish the vast radio lobes, causing them to gradually fade.

The researchers studied the XMM–LSS field using the MeerKAT radio telescope, an array of 64 antennas located in the desert-like region of the Northern Cape, South Africa, the Jansky Very Large Array, and the LOFAR (Low-Frequency Array) network.

This powerful combination of observations allowed them to study how radio emissions from the lobes of radio galaxies change as the particles within them "age" and lose energy.

This allowed the researchers to determine that 12 of the 14 candidates actually are remnant radio galaxies, while the other two remain active radio galaxies.

The team also discovered something striking about the 12 confirmed radio galaxy remnants.

One thing that really stood out in this study was the ages of these remnants, which appeared to have been fading for between 8 million and 42 million years, with the average "fade age" being 12 million years.

This age is younger than the ages measured for radio galaxy remnants, which could indicate that astronomers have been missing a population of short-lived remnants.

This wasn't the only extraordinary finding in this study. The scientists also found that the remnants they looked at exist in a wide range of evolutionary stages, with some having jets that have only just switched off, while others are more evolved, having "powered down" long ago.

The new findings represent a major step forward in understanding the life cycles of radio galaxies, and also how supermassive black holes function as the engines powering jets that drive vast radio lobes.

The team's research was published on July 14 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A mysterious hum of gravitational waves that fills the cosmos may be the echo of "dark stars" that served as the seeds of the first supermassive black holes.

These low-frequency gravitational waves were detected back in 2023 using an array of cosmic lighthouses, or pulsars, in a so-called "pulsar timing array." Pulsars are neutron stars that spin rapidly and regularly while blasting out collimated beams of radiation from their poles that can be used to detect tiny fluctuations in space and time. Such fluctuations are caused by the gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime.

For a long time, the source of this particular low-frequency gravitational wave background has been somewhat shrouded in mystery, but scientists have hoped that they may be encoded with the secrets of the universe as it was around 13 billion years ago. Indeed, the team behind this research believes this hum of spacetime ripples could help explain how supermassive black holes grew so rapidly before the universe was even a billion years old. They link this solution to hypothetical supermassive "dark stars" that may have collapsed and died in the early universe to birth massive black hole seeds, giving supermassive black hole growth a head start.

"Dark stars were originally proposed as objects that might be seen directly at cosmic dawn," Ilie said. "This work points to a completely different way of testing their possible role in cosmic history," team member Cosmin Ilie of Colgate University said in a statement. "Their descendants could leave a gravitational-wave imprint that persists all the way to the present-day universe."

Cosmic clocks and collapsing Dark Stars

Pulsar timing arrays detect gravitational waves when their passage squashes and stretches space as the waves ripple past them, causing tiny delays in the pulsars' beams of radiation reaching Earth.

Detecting a gravitational wave background, however, required monitoring pulsar timing arrays for many years.

"Pulsar timing arrays are usually thought of as probes of supermassive black-hole binaries in the relatively recent universe," Ilie said. "What our work shows is that the signal may also contain information about how the ancestors of those black holes formed at cosmic dawn.

"In that sense, gravitational waves observed today could provide a new window onto the birth of the first supermassive black holes."

The currently favored explanation for this background is a cosmic history of binary black holes spiraling together before merging, particularly pairings with combined masses of over 1 billion times the mass of the sun.

However, that doesn't explain where these supermassive black holes came from and how the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is routinely detecting them before the universe was even 1 billion years old — despite the fact that the feeding and merger chains proposed to create supermassive black holes should take over 1 billion years.

Ilie and his Colgate University colleague Sohan Ghodla questioned if supermassive balck hole growth began with heavy seeds, and if these heavy seeds were created by the collapse of dark stars.

Dark stars are hypothetical primordial stars that, rather than producing energy through nuclear fusion, are instead powered by self-annihilating dark matter within their cores. As dark matter fuels these primordial stars, they would remain cool compared to other stellar bodies, allowing them to continue to accrete matter throughout their lives.

This process would continue until Dark Stars reached masses millions of times that of the sun and collapsed under their own gravity, creating massive black holes; seeds that collide and merge to form supermassive black holes.

Ilie and Ghodla modeled the environment in which the resultant black hole seeds would exist and merge, calculating merger rates and the influence on the gravitational wave background.

They found supermassive dark star remnants could indeed provide a major, perhaps dominant, contribution to the gravitational wave background detected in 2023. That means the measurements provided by pulsar timing arrays could help determine how abundant heavy black hole seeds were in the early universe.

"Produce too many of these massive seeds, and you end up over-producing the pulsar timing array-detected signal," Ghodla said. "Produce too few, and you need other sources to efficiently assemble these supermassive black holes later in the life of the universe to match pulsar timing array observations."

The key determining factor here would be the masses of the dark matter haloes in which the dark stars live and in which the heavy black hole seeds form.

Determining if the researchers' theory is correct may have to wait for improvements in pulsar timing array measurements of the gravitational wave background, along with a better understanding of populations of black holes and their characteristics in the early universe.

The team's research was published on Monday (August 17) in the journal Physical Review D.

Astronomers have discovered that a jet of plasma erupting from a distant supermassive black hole at near-light-speed is being gravitationally lensed by an unseen clump of dark matter. The discovery could tell us about the source of cosmic "ghost" particles called neutrinos.

The supermassive black hole in question is powering a type of quasar called a blazar. All quasars involve supermassive black holes surrounded by vast quantities of material upon which the black holes feed. Material that isn't consumed by these feasting cosmic titans is channeled to the poles of the black holes, from where it is blasted out as plasma jets. A blazar differs from quasars in general because the jets it blasts out are directed at Earth. Blazars, like the one central to this study, designated PKS 2233-148, have long been proposed to be the cosmic particle accelerators that blast out neutrinos.

Neutrinos get their ghostly nickname because they carry no charge and very little mass, meaning that 100 trillion of them can pass through your body every second without you noticing a thing. This makes them hard to both detect and trace back to a source. This gravitationally lensed blazar could assist in that hunt, finally proving blazars are filling the universe with cosmic ghosts.

"These large-scale jets are cosmic accelerators and might be generating neutrinos," Silke Britzen at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany told Phys.org. "We study them to search for any peculiarities which might help us to gain a better understanding of neutrino emission."

Blazar jet receives a cosmic course correction

Astronomers have long been interested in PKS 2233-148, identifying this blazar as one that could solidify the link between neutrinos and the jets of feeding supermassive black holes. That is because one of its polar jets is aligned along our line of sight from Earth.

Britzen and colleagues took a new look at observations of PKS 2233-148 made by the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) on Earth, the Fermi space telescope, which viewed the blazar in gamma rays, and the X-ray instrument aboard the Swift space observatory.

This revealed how the motion of the jet of PKS 2233-148 changed over time, uncovering hitherto hidden details, including the fact that this blazar jet had been suddenly shifted from its expected path.

"We are very happy to have discovered as-yet-undetected phenomena in the jet, as well as in the gamma-ray light curve," Britzen said.

What could have caused this cosmic course correction? A phenomenon first predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1915 and an unseen cluster of the universe's strangest stuff, dark matter.

What is gravitational lensing and how can dark matter cause it?

The concept of gravitational lensing emerged from Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity. General relativity states that objects with matter warp the very fabric of space, much like a bowling ball placed on a stretched rubber sheet. Gravity arises from that curvature.

And just as a cannonball would dent that hypothetical rubber sheet more than a bowling ball, an object with greater mass would cause a more extreme warp in space; its gravitational influence is greater.

Something cool happens when light passes this warped space; its usually straight path is curved. This means that when light from a background source passes a massive foreground object acting as a gravitational lens, it arrives at our telescopes at different times, meaning that the background source is magnified or, in extreme cases, can appear in multiple places in the same image.

In this case, it is the jet of PKS 2233-148 that is being lensed. But there is no object of great mass, like a galaxy or galaxy cluster, that can be seen in the right position to be doing the lensing. That leaves the possibility that the lensing body is something that can't be seen at all. Dark matter fits the bill.

Dark matter is effectively invisible because it doesn't directly interact with electromagnetic radiation, or light. In other words, dark matter doesn't emit light, and light doesn't bounce off it. That means even a clump large enough to play the role of a gravitational lens would be undetectable. But that doesn't mean light can't respond to the curvature of space caused by dark matter, just as it does to curvature caused by any body composed of "ordinary" matter like a star or a galaxy.

Like any gravitational lensing set-up, the lensing of the jet of PKS 2233-148 caused by this clump of dark matter requires precise alignment, and that means it is only a temporary thing.

"Because these are short-term phenomena, they are hard to find," Britzen said. "This is the first time that we find a lensing phenomenon which might hint at dark matter substructure."

Britzen and colleagues now hope to find other similar lensing events to further solidify the connection between blazars and neutrino factories.

The team's research was published on July 31 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A trio of heavyweight black holes are entangled in a dance of death that will quite possibly see them gradually all merge to form an even greater behemoth.

Scientists have discovered the black holes in a galaxy that is so far away its light has taken 12.5 billion years to reach us, meaning we see it as it was less than 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang. And it's offering strong supporting evidence that one of the ways black holes grew so massive so quickly in the early universe was through mergers.

"This is the first evidence of three active black holes in a single galaxy in the distant universe," Hannah Übler, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany who led the study, said in a statement. "It suggests that processes in the early universe were efficient at bringing massive black holes together, setting the stage for the massive black-hole mergers we expect to detect with future gravitational-wave observatories."

The galaxy that plays host to the black holes is catalogued as J0148-4214 and is so far away (their redshift is 5.0167) that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which made the discovery, could not see the black holes directly. Instead, the Integrated Field Spectroscopy unit on the JWST's Near Infrared Spectrometer (NIRSpec) measured the motion of hydrogen gas swirling around at high velocity in the accretion disks encircling each black hole.

"The JWST data allowed us not only to identify the three black holes, but also to estimate their masses, accretion rates and the stellar mass of the galaxy," Giovanni Mazzolari of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics said in the statement. "We find a total stellar mass of about 1.3 billion suns, and the black holes represent a significant fraction of that."

Two of the black holes reside at the center of J0148-4214, separated by 620 light-years. One of these black holes has a huge mass of 80 million times the mass of our sun, while its companion is a relative pipsqueak at 600,000 solar masses. Yet despite its diminutive stature, the smaller black hole is growing at a tremendous rate by accreting gas faster than the Eddington limit. This is the theoretical maximum rate at which material can fall towards a black hole; if the rate is any higher then the accretion disk around the black hole becomes so dense and hot that radiation from the disk blows material back out again, stifling the black hole's feeding frenzy. This means the smaller black hole will only be able to keep growing at this rate for a short time before negative feedback calls a halt.

The third black hole is 5,500 light-years out from the center of J0148-4214 and has a mass two million times greater than the mass of our sun. This is about half the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, called Sagittarius A*. It's thought that this third black hole, and quite possibly the second one too, found their way into J0148-4214 via mergers between galaxies.

"These results are extremely exciting," said Roberto Maiolini of the University of Cambridge, who was a participant in the findings. "They suggest that black-hole merging may be an additional, fast route for their rapid growth in the early universe."

Mergers between black holes produce bursts of gravitational waves. Current gravitational-wave detectors — including The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States, Virgo in Italy and KAGRA in Japan — are able to detect the high frequency, short wavelength gravitational waves from the mergers of stellar-mass black holes, the kind formed in certain supernova explosions. To detect the much longer wavelength, shorter frequency gravitational waves produced by the merger of supermassive black holes such as those in J0148-4214 requires a space-based detector with a baseline many millions of miles long.

To that end, the European Space Agency plans to launch LISA, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. If all goes to plan, by the mid-2030s. LISA will feature three spacecraft in triangular formation, each side of the triangle being 1.55 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) long. The three spacecraft will beam lasers at each other, looking for deviations in the travel time of those laser beams as evidence for the passing of a long-wavelength gravitational wave.

With regards to J0148-4214, however, there is a caveat: The third black hole might not be on a collision course with the other two. Instead, it could be heading out of the galaxy.

It's the classic three-body problem: How do three objects orbiting one another interact?

The two smaller black holes may have entered J0148-4214 as a binary pair. Then, as they were drawn closer to the 80-million-solar-mass black hole, the more massive black hole could have snatched the 600,000-solar-mass black hole while exchanging angular momentum with the two-million-solar-mass black hole to fling it away at high velocity. We see a similar effect in our galaxy with hypervelocity stars that are racing out of the Milky Way. These speedy stars used to be part of a binary pair of stars that got too close to Sagittarius A*, which is the black hole at the center of our galaxy. One half of the binary was captured by the black hole and the other was flung away.

Currently, there is no way to measure the direction of motion of the third black hole in J0148-4214 and confirm whether it will merge with the other two black holes or escape. If it did escape, it could still be wandering alone and dark in intergalactic space even now, 12.5 billion years later.

The findings are presented in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Supermassive black holes are best known for their immense gravity, pulling in everything that strays too close, even light. But new research suggests these cosmic giants can also hurl enormous amounts of energy outward, driving powerful disturbances that ripple hundreds of thousands of light-years through space.

A study led by Satoshi Yamada of Tohoku University in Japan found that winds generated by an actively feeding supermassive black hole are about 100 times more powerful than astronomers previously estimated.

These outflows, scientists say, inject an amount of energy comparable to several billion supernova explosions, driving turbulence through hot gas across distances of roughly 300,000 light-years —far beyond the boundaries of the host galaxy itself.

"Black holes are largely known for sucking matter in, but they also eject gas in the form of powerful winds," Yamada said in a statement. "These winds were thought to be contained within the galaxy, but our study revealed that the force is immensely more powerful than previously understood."

To measure the extent of those outflows, Yamada and his colleagues observed H1821+643, a bright quasar in the constellation Draco about 3.4 billion light-years from Earth. The galaxy hosting H1821+643 sits at the center of a dense galaxy cluster and harbors an active supermassive black hole estimated to be three to four billion times the mass of the sun.

During a weeklong observation in September 2024, Yamada and his team used XRISM, the X-ray satellite launched by Japan's space agency in 2023, to track the chemical signature of ionized iron atoms in the surrounding hot gas. By examining how the light from these iron ions stretched and broadened, the researchers were able to determine how fast the gas was moving and how turbulent it had become, according to the statement.

The observations revealed that the turbulence is driven by energy released from the quasar, with its effects reaching distances of about 300,000 light-years from the black hole, the study notes.

The result builds on years of observations of H1821+643, which is, in fact, the closest known quasar to Earth located within a galaxy cluster, according to NASA.

One of the more intriguing discoveries came in 2022, when observations of the black hole's spin using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory showed it rotates half as quickly as its smaller peers, which spin close to the speed of light.

"The million-dollar question is, why?" Christopher Reynolds, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the 2022 study, said in a statement at the time.

According to that study, one leading hypothesis is that giants like H1821+643 grew primarily through repeated mergers with other black holes arriving from different directions. Those chaotic collisions may have repeatedly disrupted the black hole's rotation instead of steadily spinning it up through a long-lived accretion disk.

While the exact origin of its sluggish spin remains an open question, the black hole's influence clearly extends far beyond its host galaxy.

"For the first time, we have shown that black holes influence the broader cosmic environment through a shock wave of astonishing power," Yamada said in the statement.

"Black holes are key drivers of gas flows and motion in space, transporting vast amounts of energy to different regions of the cosmos."

This research is also described in a paper published July 28 in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The most distant 'black hole star' yet found, existing in the universe less than 660 million years after the Big Bang, has provided a vital clue as to the origin of the mysterious "little red dots" that populate the James Webb Space Telescope's images of the early universe.

The consensus seems to be that these bizarre objects, which were first discovered in 2022, are growing supermassive black holes entombed within huge clouds of gas that have spectrums similar to cool, red stars, such as red giants. Recently, astronomers have been finding that some of these objects are placed within the center of young galaxies whose light has been traveling for about 12 billion years, give or take a billion, to reach us. Given their distance and faintness, black hole stars' light is difficult to disentangle from the light of a surrounding galaxy, especially when we know there is likely a galaxy there that's too faint for the JWST to resolve.

However, a newly discovered black hole star, unearthed during a JWST program called the Mirage or Miracle (MoM) survey, is acting as a kind of a missing link.

"The Mirage or Miracle survey was designed specifically to target sources considered 'risky,' meaning they could either be amazing discoveries or just interlopers, such as some cold nearby stars that look like distant galaxies," Jorryt Matthee of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and a co-investigator on the MoM survey said in a statement. In particular, the survey focuses on objects that look like they could be very high redshift galaxies (around a redshift of 10 or more, which equates to having existed about at least 13.1 billion years ago).

The black hole star found by the survey has been named MoM-BH*-1 and is the best example yet of a "naked" black hole star, meaning astronomers are fairly certain it exists in space on its own rather than inside a burgeoning galaxy. This means all of its light is generated by accretion onto the black hole at the center of the cloud. Though we cannot see this accretion because of the obscuring gas cloud, this light energizes the surrounding cloud from within, causing it to glow just as energy generated within the sun causes its outer layers to radiate.

"The spectrum we detected is our best evidence of a cloak of gas feeding an early forming black hole," Rohan Naidu of the University of Hawaii, who led the team who discovered MoM-BH*-1 and is co-leader of the MoM survey, said in the statement.

Intriguingly, MoM-BH*-1 lies close in space to a young galaxy at the same redshift, and estimates suggest that it will take another 100 million years for the black hole star to collide and merge with the galaxy. Naidu and Matthee's team modeled what the spectrum of the galaxy would look like after it has merged with MoM-BH*-1, and found that it would look very much like the little red dots already known to exist within galaxies.

"Considering the black hole star as a template for the black hole component of little red dots helps clarify many of the uncertainties about them," said Matthee. "If embedded in similar host galaxies, black hole stars like MoM-BH*-1 might well serve as the central engines of baby quasars."

In this way, MoM-BH*-1 provides strong evidence for the object at the heart of faint galaxies encompassing little red dots as being a black hole star. Recent observations of some little red dots at lower redshifts have shown the cloud of gas around the black hole begin to disintegrate, exposing the black hole and the X-rays produced by the accretion of gas onto it. These black holes appear to be growing fast, and the environments surrounding such active black holes become highly luminous, creating a quasar.

"Astronomers have never lacked imagination: since the discovery of quasars, there has been no dearth of theories to explain how these black holes grew so massive so fast," said Naidu. "Something spectacular must have happened in the early universe. Now with JWST, we can directly observe this era and see for ourselves which scenarios actually occur."

Learning of the birth of supermassive black holes and whether they predate the galaxies that surround them was one of the primary science goals of the JWST before it launched. In this it has been tremendously successful so far. Despite little red dots having only been discovered four years ago, research into them and black hole stars is accelerating, with new findings coming out now almost on a weekly basis.

"These are incredibly exciting times with nearly a thousand papers and preprints on little red dots in the past two to three years," said Matthee. "Far from a mirage, this might well be a cosmic miracle."

The findings were published on Aug. 13 in the journal Nature.

Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to observe the violent outflow of material from a distant black hole. The observation once again shows that even the hungriest black holes are extremely messy eaters, while also revealing the "digestive processes" of these cosmic titans in unprecedented detail.

The research focuses on the black hole system Swift J1727.8−1613, located around 8,800 light-years away, and a violent bout of cosmic indigestion and the bright eruptions the system triggered back in 2023. That episode is what initially led to the discovery of Swift J1727.8−1613 in 2023, and it resulted in the system becoming one of the brightest X-ray sources in the sky over Earth.

A team of astronomers has now discovered that as this black hole greedily stripped a star of its stellar material, some of this matter was consumed, but other stellar material was blasted back into space as high-speed jets and powerful black hole winds. They also found that the most massive outflows of material happened when the black hole's feeding activity was much lower than previously thought. The upshot of this is the conclusion that black holes aren't quite the "bottomless pits" scientists had assumed, but are far more like complex cosmic digestive systems.

"People often imagine black holes simply swallowing everything around them," team leader Noel Castro Segura of the University of Warwick in the UK said in a statement. "What we're seeing is a much more complex process. Matter falls in, the system processes it, and a surprising amount is expelled again."

The changing face of a feeding black hole

Swift J1727.8−1613 consists of a black hole surrounded by a swirling platter of material pulled away from a companion star. This matter still has angular momentum, or rotation, so it can't directly fall to the black hole, but instead forms this structure, called an accretion disk.

The immense gravitational influence of the black hole generates intense tidal forces and friction in the accretion disk, superheating it and causing it to glow brightly.

The observations of this glowing disk conducted by Segura and colleagues differ from previous studies of black hole outbursts because their detailed study allowed them to watch the Swift J1727.8−1613 system change over time as it fed on a star.

The resulting "movie" of this feeding black hole revealed that as the cosmic titan blasted out jets, the accretion disk slowly feeding it underwent changes of its own.

That gives scientists a rare and fleeting insight into the connection that exists between matter falling to the maw of a black hole and the material being blasted out at near light-speed as jets of plasma.

The team also found that even after the feeding frenzy of this black hole had subsided, it seemed to still be powering black hole winds of dense gas. They suggest that the amount of material flung away by the black hole may eventually amount to the same mass as that consumed by the black hole, meaning half of its stellar meal was eventually lost to space.

"If black holes can continue shedding material even after their largest outbursts, it means they may be much less efficient eaters than we previously assumed," Segura added. "A significant fraction of the meal may never reach the black hole at all, changing our understanding of how binary stars in galaxies evolve."

The fact that this team was able to observe the entire feeding cycle of this black hole from its initial flare to its dramatic and rather windy end paints a clearer and more dynamic picture of this process than scientists have ever had access to before.

"We usually gravitate towards the dramatic fireworks when a black hole outburst begins, but our observations show that the finale can be just as intense," Kyle Solomons, Doctoral Researcher at the University of Cape Town, said.

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 29) in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

Some of the brightest objects in the universe may also hold the key to understanding how galaxies evolve — especially when gravity transforms them into giant cosmic magnifying glasses.

Using artificial intelligence to search through data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), astronomers have identified seven promising candidates for quasars acting as gravitational lenses — natural cosmic magnifying glasses created when a massive object's gravity bends and magnifies light from a more distant object.

These unusual systems could help researchers better understand how actively growing supermassive black holes evolve, according to a statement from Ohio State University.

"Quasars are like the baby pictures of a supermassive black hole," Everett McArthur, lead author of the study and a graduate student in astronomy at The Ohio State University, said in the statement. "So exploring how we get from quasars to those black holes is really important."

Quasars are the intensely bright centers of galaxies powered by actively feeding supermassive black holes. Studying these objects can help researchers understand how black holes evolve into the enormous ones found throughout the modern universe. But as these black holes pull in gas and dust, they release so much energy that they can outshine their entire host galaxies, making those galaxies difficult to study.

Rare cases where a quasar acts as a gravitational lens offer a way around that problem, giving astronomers a unique opportunity to observe both the quasar and the distant galaxy whose light is magnified by its gravity.

However, finding these rare alignments can be exceptionally challenging. To uncover them, the research team began with a catalog of roughly 800,000 quasars identified by DESI and used a machine-learning model to search for subtle signatures of gravitational lensing.

Because so few quasars acting as gravitational lenses are known, researchers had little real-world data to train their AI model. Instead, they generated simulated examples of these cosmic alignments, allowing the algorithm to learn what to look for before searching the DESI catalog. The algorithm narrowed the search to about 200 candidates, which researchers then reviewed manually. That process resulted in seven new quasar lens candidates.

The discoveries roughly double the number of known systems found through similar survey searches, according to the statement.

While artificial intelligence played a key role in finding the candidates, the discoveries highlight the scientific potential hidden within the massive datasets produced by modern astronomy. DESI is mapping millions of galaxies and quasars, creating an enormous archive that would be nearly impossible to search by hand.

Follow-up observations will be needed to confirm the newly identified quasar lenses and study their properties in greater detail. If verified, they could offer astronomers a powerful new way to investigate how supermassive black holes shaped the galaxies around them while demonstrating how AI can uncover rare cosmic phenomena hidden within the enormous datasets produced by modern sky surveys.

Their findings were published July 22 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Using NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope, astronomers have spotted the blisteringly hot exhaust fumes of one the earliest quasars, cosmic "breath" with temperatures as great as 36 million degrees Fahrenheit. This intensely bright titan is powered by a feeding supermassive black hole engine.

The Chandra X-ray telescope observed a relatively silent quasar that existed 2.1 billion years after the Big Bang. The cosmic "exhaust fumes" from this black hole engines extend out for around 100,000 light-years around a quasar at the heart of a still-forming galactic cluster, or "proto-cluster" called MQN01. These blisteringly hot gas structures will eventually become the atmospheres that envelope modern clusters of galaxies, known as the intracluster medium (ICM).

Thus, this research reveals for the first time the exact moment in cosmic history that these galactic atmospheres began to form and gather.

"The central scientific question is to understand how this hot phase forms: what are the physical conditions of the gas during its formation and what processes contribute to its heating," team member Sebastiano Cantalupo of the University of Milan-Bicocca said in a statement.

"[The data] show extraordinary properties of the gas that could provide us with the first insights into how this hot phase of the circumgalactic medium, which we now see as intracluster medium, formed."

Start your engines...

The team behind this research spotted this hot gas structure after 180 hours of X-ray observations conducted by Chandra. Until now, X-ray detections such as this have only been made for quasars that sit in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) at the heart of "radio-loud" galaxies.

The X-ray emissions from these radio galaxies come from jets of particles blasted out from around feeding supermassive black holes at near-light speeds.

But the quasar at the heart of MQN01 differs from these because it is radio-quiet. This means the X-rays detected by Chandra from this quasar are uncontaminated by plasma jets, so the observation is entirely the result of the cosmic "motorbreath" from the quasar.

"We are facing one of the most distant detections of extended thermal X-ray emission associated with the formation of hot gas in dense regions of the universe, which will likely evolve into the known local ICM," Cantalupo said.

"We believe we have identified a phase in its life in which cold gas falls towards the gravitational potential of this massive halo and is heated by gravitational shocks, reaching temperatures of about 20 million Kelvin [36 million degrees Fahrenheit (20 million degrees Celsius)].

"The densities and pressures we measured are high: one to two orders of magnitude higher than those of clusters in our local universe."

The observations of this radio-quiet galaxy were possible thanks to the application of a technique usually used to analyze Seyfert galaxies, which host feeding supermassive black holes in the local universe (the area of space found within 1 billion light-years of Earth). The challenge the team faced was isolating the faint light from the gas from the blinding glare of gas closer to the central black hole.

"We were initially extremely skeptical ourselves," team leader Andrea Travascio of the INAF said. "Given the exceptional nature of the data, we sifted through every alternative explanation: from artificial outflows to instrumental contamination or other unsuspected effects. But each alternative scenario encountered insurmountable theoretical limitations. The thermal explanation is the only one consistent with the physical data."

Travascio and the team are now analyzing archival datasets from hundreds of other quasars to discover if this heating phase is common to protoclusters or if MQN01 is a rarity.

"Considering how unique the result was and also taking into account Chandra's technical difficulties in the final phases of its mission, the satellite has once again demonstrated its extraordinary ability to produce scientifically relevant results even after decades of operation," Travascio said.

The team's research was published on Friday (July 24) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Using the Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have seen a supermassive black hole jet churning and "cooking" gas surrounding a galaxy nicknamed the "red potato." And this potato is seen as it was when the universe was around 2 billion years old.

The galaxy in question is officially designated MQN01 J004131.9-493704 and is located about 11.7 billion light-years from Earth at the intersection of a vast cosmic web along which galaxies formed in the early universe. Originally discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the odd, blob-like appearance of the galaxy is why it has such a peculiar nickname.

The red potato sits in a cosmic "pot" of cold and dense gas. This is a little puzzling, as this should mean that stars are actively forming around it, but that isn't happening. New research offers an explanation: a supermassive black hole in the vicinity of the red potato is churning and heating the galaxy's pot of gas. This could be preventing the gas from cooling and collapsing to birth stellar bodies.

“Stars are not forming like we thought they would, so we went searching for the reason why," team leader Weichen Wang of the University of Milan-Bicocca in Italy said in a statement. "We found there may be a cook in this cosmic kitchen."

An unexpected chef

A supermassive black hole's interference with the red potato was first indicated by the fact that its surrounding gas is unexpectedly turbulent in comparison to similar gas clouds around similar galaxies.

Wang and colleagues set about hunting for the source of this turbulence with Chandra. That's when they found a black hole jet pointed toward the red potato, which they reasoned must be slamming into this ancient galaxy's gas envelope.

"If the black hole's jet is stirring up the gas around the red potato, it could greatly slow down how quickly the galaxy can acquire new, fresh material to form stars," team member Sebastiano Cantalupo of the University of Milan-Bicocca said in the statement. "With the energy from the stirring, the galaxy will starve and not be able to produce new stars at the rate expected for similar galaxies at the same cosmic epoch."

The meddling supermassive black hole is located in a galaxy around 200,000 light-years from the red potato, and this galaxy is actually very actively forming new stars. Indeed, other galaxies in the vicinity of the Red Potato are also birthing new stars.

This discovery, as part of some of the first research to investigate the behavior of gas around non-star-forming galaxies, could be vital in improving our understanding of how neighboring galaxies interact and, occasionally, interfere with each other's evolution.

"The red potato is leaving crumbs of information that may help us track down the answers to some really big questions," team member Andrea Travascio, also of the University of Milan-Bicocca, said. "Quite an important job for a galactic spud like this."

The team's research was published on July 7 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Fixing a problem inside one of the world's most sophisticated scientific observatories might seem like the kind of challenge that demands a multimillion-dollar upgrade or revolutionary new technology.

But for scientists working on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which listens for ripples in spacetime generated by cosmic collisions like merging black holes, the solution to a mild but persistent engineering challenge turns out to be as simple as an off-the-shelf camera.

By pairing commercially available thermal imaging cameras with computer models, a team led by Jonathan Richardson at the University of California, Riverside, has developed a technique that corrects tiny, heat-induced distortions in the observatory's mirrors — an elusive flaw that scientists say currently limits how far into deep space the facility can look.

"It doesn't require any new technology development, which is almost unheard of for solving a LIGO instrumentation problem," Richardson said in a statement.

Once incorporated into LIGO's upcoming upgrade, Richardson and his team estimate the fix would extend the observatory's reach by roughly 33 million light-years.

That gain might sound like a drop in the ocean against the unimaginably vast scale of the universe, but because space expands in three dimensions, pushing a detector's reach even slightly opens up an exponentially larger window of space. Being able to look further into the universe will allow astronomers to "hear" many more cosmic ripples, in turn increasing the potential for discovering the universe’s most violent collisions that lie beyond LIGO's reach today.

LIGO detects these cosmic ripples, known as gravitational waves, using twin L-shaped facilities in the U.S. — in the states of Washington and Louisiana. Inside each detector, a laser beam shoots down two 2.5-mile-long (4-kilometer-long) tunnels, bouncing off pristine mirrors at each end. When a gravitational wave passes through Earth, it subtly stretches one tunnel and squeezes the other. That microscopic shift alters the laser beams ever so slightly, producing a tiny flicker of light that alerts scientists to a distant cosmic event.

Because these cosmic signals are inconceivably small, preserving every single photon is crucial. To accomplish this, LIGO relies on mirrors polished to reflect 99.9999%t of the laser light that strikes them, ranking them among the purest optical components ever built.

Yet even these near-perfect mirrors have had one unavoidable flaw. The mirrors still absorb a tiny fraction of that intense laser light. That energy turns into heat, warping the mirror's surface by just a few nanometers, enough to distort the laser beam and reduce the observatory's overall sensitivity.

Physicists already knew they could counteract these distortions by applying targeted heat to the back of the mirrors. The difficult part was measuring the distortions accurately enough such that the correcting heat could be applied with exact precision.

The new technique uses infrared thermal images and existing computer models to reconstruct a map of distortions across the mirror's surface.

"You can think of it like taking an infrared picture of a car engine," Richardson said in the statement. "An engineer can look at the temperature pattern on the outside and infer what's happening inside the engine. We're doing the same thing with LIGO's mirrors."

And the technique isn't just a fix for LIGO. It is also expected to become part of the foundational design for Cosmic Explorer, a proposed next-generation U.S. gravitational-wave observatory targeted for the mid-2030s.

With 25-mile-long (40-km-long) arms — 10 times larger than LIGO's — Cosmic Explorer is already designed to detect gravitational wave events far beyond the reach of today's observatories. This new technique will only supercharge its ultimate reach.

"The goal for the next generation of gravitational-wave detectors is to achieve about 10 times the sensitivity of today's instruments," Richardson said in the statement. "One of the key obstacles to achieving that is reducing the fundamental quantum mechanical noise that limits the precision of the measurements."

The technique is described in a paper published July 16 in Classical and Quantum Gravity.

Paleontologists now know that many of the dinosaurs didn't disappear but instead evolved into modern birds, and new research suggests that "cosmic dinosaurs" observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) didn't go extinct either. Rather, they may have evolved into familiar sights in the modern universe: vast conglomerations of densely packed stars called "globular clusters."

Little Red Dots became quite the puzzle for astronomers in 2022, when the JWST began to routinely spot them in abundance around 600 million years after the Big Bang. That is because these objects seemingly disappear before the cosmos gets to around 2 billion years old.

Astronomers have proposed many different explanations for Little Red Dots, including the suggestion that they could be "black hole stars," or black holes wrapped in vast shrouds of dense gas and dust. This team theorizes that a forming globular cluster with a supermassive star, a hypothetical short-lived stellar body with between 1,000 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, would also look a lot like a Little Red Dot at its heart.

"These may not be just a strange new JWST population with no connection to the universe around us today," team leader John Chisholm of the University of Texas Austin said in a statement. "Instead, Little Red Dots may persist past the early universe, evolving into something relatively familiar.

"Little Red Dots could be galaxies, they could involve black holes, or they could be something even more unexpected. Our work shows that forming globular clusters with supermassive stars should be part of that conversation."

An unfamiliar side to a familar sight

Globular clusters are generally seen in large galaxies and are densely packed with up to many millions of ancient stars. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is host to at least 150 globular clusters, and though familiar, astronomers still aren't quite sure how they form.

"We usually see them [globular clusters] after billions of years of evolution, at a time when their massive stars are gone, their gas has been cleared out, and dynamical processes have changed their masses and structures," team member Danielle Berg of UT Austin said in the statement. "That makes it very hard to reconstruct the original conditions they formed in."

It is thought that the stars in globular clusters all formed at the same time in the early universe. However, at this time the cosmos should only have had hydrogen, helium and a smattering of heavier elements (which astronomers call "metals") available for star construction. Yet, many stars in globular clusters are strangely abundant in helium and metals like nitrogen, sodium and aluminum, while lacking the expected levels of carbon, oxygen and magnesium.

"This specific pattern indicates nuclear fusion at very high temperatures, much higher than in the cores of even massive normal stars," team member Mike Boylan-Kolchin of UT Austin said in the statement. "A supermassive star is precisely the kind of environment that could produce this combination."

Supermassive stars capable of generating this kind of heat would form in the dense environments of early globular clusters in which stellar collisions and mergers would be expected to occur over and over again. The resultant supermassive stars would be short-lived, lasting just around 1 million years (remember the sun is middle-aged at 4.6 billion years old) — but this would be sufficient time to forge the elements needed to explain the peculiar chemistry of globular clusters.

When these supermassive stars die in supernova explosions, the elements they forged would be blasted out to become the building blocks of the next generation of stars. This would provide the stars of modern globular clusters with their unusual chemical fingerprints.

"In our model, the supermassive star that helps make the object look like a Little Red Dot would live for only a short time," Chisholm continued. "Once that star dies, the object may no longer look like a Little Red Dot, even if the cluster itself survives billions of years."

Strange chemistry isn't the only thing linking early globular clusters with Little Red Dots, however. Not only does the team propose that the distribution of Little Red Dots in the early universe matches the distribution of modern globular clusters, but they also say models of Little Red Dot evolution show that their estimated masses could easily lead to the masses of globular clusters seen in the recent universe.

There is also the issue of timing. Little Red Dots appear around 600 million years after the Big Bang, and that is also the time that scientists estimate that globular clusters would have begun to form.

"There's no single smoking gun at this point that says Little Red Dots are globular clusters, but it would explain a lot of diverse and surprising observations," said Boylan-Kolchin.

This study is currently available to view as a pre-print on the paper repository arXiv.

The launch of NASA's next super telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), may mean there is nowhere left for violent black holes to hide.

In fact, these cosmic cannibals may not even be able to hide from Roman at "cosmic noon," a period of the universe's history that occurred around 11 billion to 12 billion years ago. The study of these gory stellar events so early in the history of the universe could help reveal how supermassive black holes grew so big, so rapidly.

Occurrences of black holes ripping apart stars are called tidal disruption events (TDEs), and they happen when an unfortunate star's orbit brings it too close to the immense gravitational influence of a supermassive black hole. This simultaneously squashes and squeezes the star in a process called "spaghettification," with plasma pasta wrapping around the black hole and being fed gradually to it.

Because supermassive black holes are wrapped in a one-way, light-trapping boundary called an event horizon, the only way to study them is when they are actively consuming surrounding matter. Such matter swirls around them in what are known as accretion disks.

However, lighter supermassive black holes aren't ravenous feeders, making them harder to investigate. That is, until a star gets too close and is shredded in an incredibly bright TDE that can outshine the combined light of every star in the supermassive black hole's host galaxy. TDEs are more common to supermassive black holes with masses of about 100,000 to 100 million suns, because supermassive black holes with masses over 1 billion solar masses tend to immediately swallow their stellar snacks.

Previous research has suggested TDEs wouldn't be common in the early universe, because the first supermassive black holes wouldn't even have a mass of 100,000 times that of the sun and thus wouldn't shred stars. However, a new study has reassessed the frequency of TDEs around 1 billion to 2 billion years after the Big Bang, finding they could be more common than previously estimated. Especially during the crowded conditions found during cosmic noon.

Set to launch on Aug. 30, 2026, scientists are hoping Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, which will repeatedly revisit a region of the sky equivalent to 90 full moons, will be a powerful tool in the hunt for TDEs in the early universe and their subsequent study. This team estimated that Rubin will detect thousands to tens of thousands of TDEs each year, with 100s dating back to cosmic noon.

"The Roman Space Telescope is going to be transformative for transient science [transients are astronomical events that light up the sky then fade away]," research team leader Mitchell Karmen of the Johns Hopkins University said in a statement. "Thanks to Roman's high sensitivity, we can find multiple tidal disruption events out to greater distances and earlier cosmic times than ever before."

This means Roman is ideally poised to solve a puzzle that has developed since its predecessor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), began beaming data back to Earth in July 2022.

How could early TDEs solve the puzzle of black hole growth

Supermassive black holes with masses equivalent to millions or even billions of suns are found at the hearts of all large galaxies. When they are seen in the relatively local universe, that isn't so problematic; they have had plenty of time to grow via mergers and feeding.

However, the JWST has been routinely spotting supermassive black holes prior to the universe being even 1 billion years old. That is troubling because these early black holes should have had to undergo at least 1 billion years of mergers and gluttonous feeding to reach supermassive status. Scientists have two prevailing theories as to how this growth may have happened.

The first suggests supermassive black holes grow from "light seeds," beginning with black holes with masses just a few hundred times that of the sun that are born from the death and collapse of massive stars.

Such black holes might weigh up to a few hundred times the mass of the sun. These black holes would then merge over time, as well as consume surrounding gas at an incredible rate that facilitates rapid growth. For this theory to be the right one, every young galaxy would have to harbor a massive black hole at its center.

The second theory suggests early supermassive black holes grew from "heavy seeds" created directly from the collapse of vast clouds of primordial gas and dust. This would allow rapid growth because black holes could begin the whole merger and feeding process before the first stars lived and died.

Should this be the correct pathway, however, the fact that collapse events would be rare would make massive black holes at the heart of cosmic noon galaxies less common.

Because TDEs are common to less massive supermassive black holes, counting their occurrence at cosmic noon could give an indication of the masses of black holes during that epoch — the key to determining between heavy seeds and light seeds.

"Tidal disruption events help us probe the population of light supermassive black holes, which can help us discriminate between these models," Karmen said.

"Just by counting the number of TDEs as a function of redshift [a measure of cosmic distance], you can put meaningful constraints on the population of million-solar-mass black holes. Roman will be transformative in that it can probe tidal disruption events out to greater distances, so you can look at how the rate of TDEs evolves over time," team member Suvi Gezari, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, said. “Just like the JWST has transformed our understanding of distant, high-redshift [very distant] galaxies, Roman is poised to transform our understanding of high-redshift transients."

The team's research was published on July 14 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves. The observations could help scientists discover how supermassive black holes with masses millions, often even billions, of times that of the sun grew so fast so soon after the Big Bang.

While all large galaxies have supermassive black holes at their hearts, some are slumbering giants, consuming little surrounding gas and dust, while others are ravenously feeding and acting as the engines of bright central galactic regions called active galactic nuclei (AGN). These feeding black holes also blast matter from their poles in jets that can drive gas and dust — the raw material needed for star formation — out of their host galaxies, thus cutting off star birth and effectively "killing" these galaxies.

Plus, the powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge to create even more massive black holes should take at least 1 billion years to achieve supermassive status. This is even more confusing because theories also say the most ravenously feeding black holes (and thus the fastest growing) should also push the matter they use for this growth away, in effect putting themselves on a diet. So, with all this in mind, how did supermassive black holes grow so rapidly in the early universe?

One explanation suggests supermassive black holes push away gas, starving themselves as predicted, but also that this matter eventually cools and falls back to the black hole. That would allow for another period of feeding and thus growth.

This explanation further suggests that as this gas cools down, it forms "streamers," or filaments, of gas just a few hundred light-years wide but which stretch thousands of light-years long. These would fall back to the center of the galaxy and form a swirling disk around its incumbent black hole, once again feeding it and triggering a new period of growth. This would then restart the jets from the black hole, which would again cut off the cosmic titan's food supply, allowing the whole process to begin once more.

The process would in essence be a self-regulating cycle of feasting followed by fasting. However, the connection between these filaments and supermassive black holes has been elusive, meaning this mechanism has resisted confirmation.

"What JWST is revealing is that black holes may be the ultimate cosmic recyclers," team leader Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo of the Université de Montréal said in a statement. "They release enormous amounts of energy that heat their surroundings, yet that same gas can later cool into thin filaments that fall back inward and feed the black hole again. We are finally seeing this self-sustaining cycle in action."

A dieting supermassive black hole

To solve the mystery of feasting black holes, the JWST turned its attention to a relatively close AGN situated at the heart of the central galaxy of the Centaurus Cluster, NGC 4696, located just 145 million light-years from Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope previously studied this galaxy, uncovering a strange, hook-shaped swirl of gas near the central supermassive black hole of NGC 4696.

The JWST followed up this discovery by producing a detailed map of gas flowing at the heart of the galaxy. This revealed the hook-shaped feature is around 800 light-years wide and is composed of gas moving at incredible speeds of around 1.3 million miles per hour (600 kilometers per second).

More excitingly, the swirl of gas appears to be connected to a vast filament of material falling in toward the central supermassive black hole.

The team tested the JWST observations against a computer simulation, finding gas in the infalling filament scenario would indeed take a shape similar to that seen in NGC 4696.

"JWST is now showing us the final link of this closed loop," team member Helen Russell of the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. said in the statement. "The vast filamentary network of gas flows ultimately funnels gas down to a disk that fuels the black hole."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (July 16) in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

There may be an easier way to describe how black holes "leak" energy than the theory Stephen Hawking proposed — and the newly suggested process is similar to how we describe a boiling pot of water. This simple (well, relatively simple) description could be used to model black holes in many situations such as during their formation, mergers with other black holes, eventual evaporation and even explosive death.

In the 1970s, legendary theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking wrote a letter to the journal Nature entitled "Black hole explosions?" explaining how these objects may leak thermal radiation, evaporate and eventually implode at the end of their lives. This radiation eventually became known as Hawking radiation.

But in new research, scientists have suggested an alternative to Hawking radiation. It involves describing the increase in disorder, or entropy, of black holes. Boiling water, as an example, is also often described based on its increase in entropy. For black holes, this measure of entropy is connected to characteristics like spin and energy, which means it could be used to understand how these cosmic titans respond to different events.

"Hawking's laws of black hole mechanics provided a satisfying connection between extreme and ordinary physics and have been the paradigm for 50 years, but they have a serious limitation," team leader Abhay Ashtekar of the Eberly College of Science at Penn State University said in a statement. "They were formulated for black holes at equilibrium — or unchanging over time — but black holes are constantly changing; they form, merge, and eventually evaporate. We wanted to find a way to overcome this limitation and extend the laws to black holes that are out of equilibrium."

Black holes, Einstein and Hawking

To investigate the origins of black holes, one has to go back to history's most famous physicist (sorry Hawking, you're number two), Albert Einstein.

In 1915, Einstein revealed his theory of gravity, general relativity. One consequence of the equations underpinning that theory was the possibility of a singularity, a point at which the equations of general relativity go to infinity. This represents the heart of a black hole.

Another consequence of the general relativity equations is a region of space around this singularity at which gravity is so extreme that the escape velocity of the area increases to a value greater than the speed of light. That region is the light-trapping outer boundary of the black hole known as the event horizon, which prevents us from ever seeing the singularity at the heart of the black hole or receiving information from it. In fact, until Hawking's work in 1974, this is why it was proposed that nothing at all can escape a black hole.

"The laws of black hole mechanics came directly from Einstein's equations," team member Daniel E. Paraizo, a graduate student in physics at Penn State, said. "Because you cannot see into a black hole, it seemed that there could be an infinite number of ways to make a black hole, making their entropy infinite as well. They were also thought to only absorb energy and never radiate, so their temperature was zero."

However, the advent of Hawking radiation somewhat changed this paradigm. By suggesting that black holes actually radiate thermal energy, Hawking redefined them in such a way that suddenly the laws of thermodynamics could be applied to black holes.

"This changed the thinking about the thermodynamic properties of black holes from a sort of mathematical concept described by equations, to being more of a physical reality," Paraizo said. "This opened the door to finding analogies in black holes of entropy and temperature used in thermodynamics."

In Hawking's recipe for black holes, the area of the event horizon is proportional to its temperature and entropy, and is inversely proportional to its mass and its spin.

"There is a problem, though," team member Jonathan Shu, also from Penn State, said in the statement. "These analogies only really work for a black hole that is at equilibrium. In dynamic situations, event horizons can form and grow in what we call flat regions of space-time, where nothing is happening."

Shu added that a consequence of this is the properties of black holes cannot be determined just by the local physics of the black hole. Instead, determining the properties of black holes relies on the prediction of events that may or may not happen in the future.

"Therefore, the area of event horizons cannot be a measure of the physical entropy of dynamical black holes," Shu argues. "If we want to understand black holes that are growing, evaporating and merging, we need a viable alternative."

For the team, this meant replacing the event horizon of a black hole with something they call a "dynamical horizon," already used when scientists simulate black holes. Now, the first law of thermodynamics — which states the energy of a closed system cannot be created or destroyed but rather can only change forms — can be applied to black holes even when they are involved in dynamic acts. It also means black holes are subject to the second law of thermodynamics, which says the total entropy of an isolated system will always increase over time, during their birth, merger and death.

"This allows us to extend the first and second laws of thermodynamics to black holes that are not at equilibrium, thereby overcoming the limitations of the paradigm that has been used for over half a century," Ashtekar said. "We can apply these generalized laws to better understand evaporating black holes in quantum theory and black hole mergers."

The team's research was published in June in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The first of 10,000 missing black holes in the Omega Centauri globular cluster has been found thanks to teamwork by the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.

The two observatories discovered the black hole after watching a star orbiting around something massive but dark, and which therefore could not be seen. The Hubble data ran from 2003 to 2023, and the James Webb Space Telescope picked up after that to help refine the measurements.

Astronomers used the space telescopes to focus on a particular star in a binary system that appeared to be home to another, dark object called oMEGACat BH-2. Previous studies had suggested that the dark object was a neutron star. However, the new results are conclusive: the object has a mass 4.46 times that of the sun. This is too massive to be a neutron star, so it must therefore be a black hole.

Omega Centauri is the most massive of our Milky Way galaxy's globular clusters. It is so massive that astronomers suspect that it is actually the core of a dwarf galaxy that has lost most of its stars to the Milky Way's gravitational cannibalism, which over the aeons has torn strips from Omega Centauri. Even so, Omega Centauri still contains about 10 million stars, collectively located 18,000 light-years from Earth.

In 2024, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope found clinching evidence that an intermediate-mass black hole – one that has a mass about 8,200 times that of our sun – lurks at the center of Omega Centauri, strengthening its claim of being the remnant of a dwarf galaxy, since galaxies harbor black holes at their center but star clusters typically do not.

However, alongside this intermediate-mass black hole should be about 10,000 other stellar-mass black holes born from the supernova explosions of massive stars. Searches have focused on binary systems where a star orbits a compact object, but until now astronomers had drawn a blank.

Now, a team led by Matthew Whitaker of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City have come along to save the day by diligently sifting through 20 years of Hubble observations, plus additional supporting views from the JWST, to uncover a stellar-mass black hole in Omega Centauri for the first time.

Whitaker's team used a technique called astrometry, which is the measurement of the changing positions of stars as they move through space. Although the black hole itself is dark, it is orbited by a normal star with a mass 78% that of our sun. Thanks to the unprecedented vision of Hubble and the JWST, Whitaker and his colleagues were able to track the motion of this star around the black hole.

It turns out that the star is on a 94-year-long orbit around the black hole, which is the widest separation of a binary composed of a stellar-mass black hole and star ever found. Over that 20-year-period, Hubble saw less than a quarter of the star's total orbit, but it coincided with the star's closest approach to the black hole, during which the star moved faster.

Based on this motion, Whitaker's team were able to measure the strength of the black hole's gravitational field acting on the star, and from that calculate the mass of the black hole.

"The precision of these measurements is incredible, down to a fraction of a pixel on Hubble and Webb's detectors," said Whitaker in a statement. "It would not have been possible to find this black hole without these two space telescopes."

Given how wide the orbit of the star is around the black hole, the likelihood is that the black hole's gravity captured the star when it passed close. This is a state of affairs that will not last forever; within another billion years, encounters with other stars in the crowded environs of the cluster will probably pluck the black hole's companion away.

The mass of oMEGACat BH-2 does seem unusual, however, in the sense that it is lower than expected. The mass of oMEGACat BH-2 exists in a void that has only become apparent during the past eleven years of gravitational wave detections. These gravitational waves are produced by the mergers of stellar-mass black holes, but black holes with masses between 2.5 times the mass of our sun (the theoretical limit for neutron stars) and five solar masses are conspicuous by their absence in the gravitational-wave events. Yet here is oMEGACat BH-2, sitting within that mass gap.

"It's important to understand black hole populations in globular clusters because there's uncertainty about their physics and formation," said Anil Seth of the University of Utah.

"More specifically, understanding the process of forming black holes and then dynamically forming binaries is vital, because it affects our ability to interpret and understand gravitational-wave events. Environments like Omega Centauri are the primary places where we think binaries are merging and creating these waves."

In particular, the stars of Omega Centauri are more primitive than our sun, chemically speaking, with fewer elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Which types of massive stars produce black holes when they explode as supernovas is still an area of active research, but oMEGACat BH-2 adds another complication to the mix in that its progenitor star contained few heavy elements.

"We need to figure out how that happens," said Seth.

So that's one down, and 9,999 or thereabouts to go. Whitaker's team continue to use Hubble and JWST data to find more stellar-mass black holes in Omega Centauri, but he also highlights the potential of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to find black-hole binary systems in our Milky Way galaxy at least when the telescope launches later this year.

"Roman … will image the crowded galactic bulge, including the galactic center, very regularly with Hubble-like resolution and with a much wider field of view," said Whitaker. "We're hoping we'll be able to find black hole binary systems like this one because of the regular cadence of Roman's observations."

The details regarding oMEGACat BH-2 are described in a paper published on July 13 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A supermassive black hole at the heart of a nearby galaxy is behaving similarly to black holes that existed just after the Big Bang, voraciously feeding on copious amounts of matter. The relatively close cosmic titan could therefore provide insight into the much more distant universe.

Indeed, the intense accretion behavior demonstrated by the supermassive black hole, which sits at the center of the galaxy SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 located 1.8 billion light-years away, is something scientists have only ever seen in the earliest supermassive black holes.

SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 has been shining brightly in radio waves for many years, and these waves were the smoking gun that pointed to the feeding habits of the galaxy's central black hole.

"Such high-energy events can provide astronomers with a wealth of insights," Kovi Rose from the University of Sydney’s Sydney Institute for Astronomy said in the statement. "By observing these jets and outbursts, we can study the physical processes in some of the most extreme environments in the universe."

Even the hungriest black holes are messy eaters

All large galaxies have a supermassive black hole at their heart with masses of millions or even billions of times that of the sun. However, not all supermassive black holes accrete vast amounts of matter.

For example, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, consumes so little gas and dust from its surroundings that, were it a human being, it would be existing on a diet of one grain of rice every million years. (That is one heck of a diet.)

When black holes are surrounded by copious amounts of gas and dust, their immense gravitational influence causes this material, in a flattened swirling cloud called an accretion disk, to glow brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves to high-energy X-rays.

Additionally, supermassive black holes are notoriously messy eaters, meaning some of the matter in accretion disks is channeled to the poles of the black hole, from where it is blasted out as jets of plasma traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light. These jets too are responsible for bright emissions of electromagnetic radiation.

Radio signals from the spiral galaxy SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 underwent a 20-fold increase in radio brightness over a short period, increasing to around 10 quadrillion times the intensity of the radio brightness of the sun. This happened around 8 years ago, and the galaxy has yet to show any sign of dimming.

"We are dealing with the prototype of a new class of galaxies that undergo rapid changes in radio emission," team member Phil Edwards from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, said.

Team leader Stefanie Komossa of the Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, added: "Luminous radio radiation from rapidly growing, lightweight black holes is rare to begin with. Their transition into a long-lasting, radio-bright state has never been observed before."

The source of this electromagnetic radiation is situated at the heart of SDSS J110546.07+145202.4, right by its central supermassive black hole. The team thinks the brightening of this galaxy began because the rate of matter falling into its supermassive black hole had increased, triggering the generation of plasma jets.

The increase in mass consumption of the supermassive black hole is leading to a level of growth that hasn't been seen in black holes outside of the early universe before. That means that SDSS J110546.07+145202.4 and its feasting supermassive black hole are set to be prime targets for astronomical investigations for some time to come, especially as proxies for ravenous black holes and rapidly growing early galaxies.

"With sensitive facilities like the incoming SKA telescopes, we'll be able to identify similar radio transients in future sky surveys," Komossa said. "This is crucial for filling the gaps in our understanding of the early universe."

The team's research was published in May in The Astrophysical Journal.

The universe is haunted by "cosmic ghosts" called neutrinos, and new research suggests they may be the "whispers" of stars that died in supernova explosions over the course of billions of years.

The discovery is an important step forward in our understanding of the life and death of stars and how they enrich their environments with metals, elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. It could also help better understand how black holes and neutron stars are born when massive stars die.

The second most common particles in the universe, neutrinos get their spooky nickname because they are chargeless and near-massless, so phantom-like that around 100 trillion neutrinos pass through you at nearly the speed of light every second, but over your entire life only one will interact with the atoms of your body, if you're lucky.

The newly suggested connection between neutrinos and a history of supernova blasts has emerged from the first detection of a flux of neutrinos called the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background (DSNB). It was detected by one of the world's largest neutrino detectors, the Super-Kamiokande, located 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) underground in Gifu Prefecture, Japan.

"Observing the world's first indication of the Diffuse Supernova Neutrino Background is a deeply meaningful achievement and has been a long-cherished goal since the beginning of the Super-Kamiokande project," Hiroyuki Sekiya of the University of Tokyo said in a statement.

Stars go out with a bang but continue with a whisper

Supernovas come in a range of types, but the ones this research concerns are so-called "core-collapse supernovas." These occur when stars much more massive than the sun reach the end of nucleosynthesis in their cores. When they are no longer able to fuse elements to create metals heavier than iron, the stars become unable to produce the outward energy that for millions of years has balanced them against the inward push of gravity.

Thus, with gravity the ultimate winner of this cosmic tug of war, the star's core collapses, sending violent shockwaves rippling outward into the outer stellar layers, which are ripped away. This leaves the core as a stellar remnant, either a neutron star or a black hole, initially surrounded by an expanding shell of supernova debris.

The energy from these events is carried away by particles of light (photons) spread across the electromagnetic spectrum, but also by neutrinos. Yet, despite the fact that supernovas have been erupting every second over the course of 13 billion years or so to produce the neutrinos that accumulate as the DSNB, this ghostly signal is still faint, a whisper rather than a shout.

To "hear" these cosmic whispers, the team behind this research analysed almost 14 years of data from Super-Kamiokande in the form of Cherenkov light generated when neutrinos interact with 50,000 tons of ultrapure water.

This revealed a signal of neutrinos in line with what would be expected from the DSNB. This signal still needs to be confirmed, but it is a strong indicator of the DSNB, the first humanity has ever had.

"We are already planning on incorporating ongoing observations at Super-Kamiokande together with its successor detector, Hyper-Kamiokande, to further improve sensitivity in future collaborative studies," said team member Yosuke Ashida,of Tohoku University.

The team's results were presented on June 25, 2026, at Neutrino 2026: XXXII International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics, held at the University of California, Irvine, USA.

Using the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope, astronomers have discovered a treasure trove of 31 black-hole-powered quasars in the early universe. The most impressive of these new discoveries is the most ancient and distant quasar ever seen, shining with the light of a trillion suns just 670 million years after the Big Bang.

Quasars occur when supermassive black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun are surrounded by swirling disks of matter called accretion disks. As accretion disks gradually feed these central cosmic titans, the immense gravity of the black holes generates intense friction, causing this matter to glow so brightly that their luminosity can exceed the combined light of every star in their host galaxies.

Despite this, quasars can still be difficult to spot at vast cosmic distances, with their light difficult to distinguish from the light of much more proximate stars. Thus, the hunt for the earliest quasars has been on for decades, with scientists hoping that the discovery of these bodies could help explain how supermassive black holes grew so rapidly so shortly after the Big Bang. Launched in 2023, Euclid has fulfilled its promise in its mission to discover early quasars, with this hitherto unprecedented haul of 31 of these black hole engines.

"These early quasars date back to the Universe's infancy," team leader Daming Yang of Leiden University in the Netherlands said in a statement. "By finding and studying them, we can better understand how these enormous systems formed and grew so quickly — one of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics."

Previously, astronomers took around a decade to discover the first ten or so quasars at distances like this, which makes it incredibly impressive that Euclid has managed to detect more than three times that many ancient black hole engines in just a single year of observations.

The tip of the iceberg

Thanks to this new treasure trove of quasars discovered when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was merely 5% of its current age includes not just the brightest examples of these objects, but also some fainter quasars. That now means scientists can finally study these objects as a population.

"Euclid is a true game-changer," Yang continued. "Before, we could only find a handful of the very brightest ancient quasars, but Euclid lets us search far more efficiently across huge areas of sky to capture much fainter light. It’s a unique tool for quasar hunting."

Of the 31 new quasars, 12 existed when the universe was around 770 million years old, but the two that really stand out are the quasars designated EUCL J172902.75+641018.1 and EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, which are around 13 billion light-years away and existed just 670 million years after the Big Bang. That makes them the most ancient quasars ever documented.

"This finding more than doubles the number of quasars we know of that are so ancient," Antonio La Marca , a European Space Agency (ESA) Research Fellow on the Euclid team, said in the statement. "The Euclid team has taken a true 'census' of quasars at the dawn of the Universe for the first time. It's a big step towards understanding these fascinating objects on a more fundamental level."

The quasars date back to a period of the cosmos known as the epoch of reionization, which lasted from around 680 million years after the Big Bang to 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang. During this period, the universe's "dark ages" drew to a close with photons, particles of light, suddenly free to traverse the cosmos. Thus, these 31 quasars offer a unique opportunity to study this vital period in cosmic history.

"Ancient quasars are rare discoveries," ESA Euclid Project Scientist Valeria Pettorino said in the statement. "They're interesting in themselves, but also time machines that enable us to explore the early universe and understand how the first generation of galaxies came to be."

The 31 quasars were discovered as part of the Euclid Wide Survey, which will eventually cover around one-third of the total sky over Earth.

Scientists hope that this survey will shed light on the so-called "dark universe" comprised of two of the most pressing cosmic mysteries: dark energy, the puzzling force driving the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, and the nature of dark matter, the most abundant "stuff" in the cosmos which remains effectively invisible.

"Euclid's capabilities are unrivalled," Pettorino concluded. "The telescope combines a large area, depth, sharp imaging, and unique space-based infrared vision in a way that lets us pick out rare, extremely distant objects far more efficiently than before."

The team's research was published on Monday (July 6) in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Mysterious "little red dots" discovered in the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope could harbor buried black holes that fire high-energy cosmic "ghost particles" through the cosmos.

Neutrinos are referred to as ghost particles because as chargeless and near-massless particles, hundreds of trillions of them stream through your body every second at nearly the speed of light. Plus, the source of high-energy neutrinos frequently detected on Earth is something of a mystery.

And another cosmic mystery is the existence of the "little red dots," which are galaxies that have been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Though common around 600 million years after the Big Bang, these dots seem to disappear before the universe gets to 2 billion years old. Some researchers have theorized that these curious small galaxies could harbor black holes that are buried in thick shrouds of cosmic dust. If that is the case, then the dots could be a major contributor of high-energy neutrinos, linking these two mysteries.

Neutrinos are produced when other particles, such as protons, collide with particles of light, or photons, or with different sorts of matter. This usually occurs in gas-dense environments, but the ghost-like characteristics of neutrinos mean they have little trouble escaping into the universe at large.

Usually, the events that create high-energy neutrinos also give rise to high-energy photons called gamma-rays. However, neutrinos are so abundant as the second most common particles in the cosmos that if all sources of neutrinos also created gamma-rays, the gamma-ray background of our universe should be much greater than it actually is.

That means some sources of high-energy neutrinos must be located in environments from which gamma-rays can't readily escape — and that's where the little red dots enter the picture. These curious objects display very little emission associated with galactic jets or other outflows. This led this team to assume that the lack of these emissions, which should come in the form of X-rays and radio waves, is because the black holes and associated jets in Little Red Dots are buried in dense halos of dust and gas.

"In the scenario we considered, abundant photons and dense gas are expected to exist around the central black hole in a little red dot, which may allow such collisions to occur efficiently," team leader Riku Kuze of Kyoto University said in a statement.

Kuze and colleagues estimated the contribution that the little red dots could add to the universe's neutrino background. This revealed that, should particle acceleration be occurring in the buried black holes within the dots, these environments could produce high-energy neutrinos to contribute a significant fraction of the high-energy neutrino background observed on Earth. This would be while also suppressing gamma-ray escape.

"Although it is difficult to observe the individual objects directly, we believe this study is significant because it is the first to demonstrate that, given their abundance, these little red galaxies could account for a part of the observed high-energy neutrinos," said Kuze.

Neutrinos come in more than one type, or flavor; thus, the next step for the team will be to determine the ratio of neutrino flavors generated by buried black holes in the little red dots and to determine if this matches cosmic abundances witnessed.

The team's research was published in the journal Physical Review D.

The loudest crash of gravitational waves ever heard has offered us insight into event horizons, the boundaries beyond which nothing can escape the grips of black holes.

The gravitational wave signal GW250114 was picked up in January 2025 by LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), Virgo, and KAGRA ( Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector). The signal was created when two black holes with around 32 times the mass of the sun collided and set the very fabric of space rippling.

Now, a team of researchers assessed this signal and found a feature in the gravitational waves represents the collective event horizon of the involved black holes at the very moment of that collision.

"We measured the last sound the black holes made when they crashed. Hidden within that signal is a small component, called direct waves, that had not previously been well understood," research co-leader Neil Lu, from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), said in a statement. "Our new analysis allows us to decipher this component and extract unique information from close to the event horizon."

The team's research presents the intriguing possibility that scientists could use gravitational waves to study these mysterious black hole boundaries.

Event horizons and the point of no return

The concept of an event horizon first emerged through solutions to the equations of Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity. These solutions were developed by Karl Schwarzschild while serving with the German army on the Eastern Front in the First World War.

Schwarzschild found a point around a body with mass at which the escape velocity, the speed needed to escape the gravitational grip of that body, exceeds the speed of light. Also known as the Schwarzschild radius, the size of that boundary depends on the mass of the body. So the Schwarzschild radius for the sun would be about 1.86 miles (3 kilometers) from its center of mass; for the Earth, it would be just 0.35 inches (9 millimeters) from our planet's center of mass. That's the case with all planets and stars; the Schwarzschild radius is well within the bodies of those objects.

However, for a black hole, the Schwarzschild radius is far from the center of mass, acting as a light-trapping outer boundary: the event horizon. To escape the gravitational grip of a black hole from this point, matter would have to accelerate to a speed faster than the speed of light, which Einstein's theory of special relativity tells us would require infinite energy. Nothing in the universe travels faster than light; thus, nothing escapes the event horizon.

To understand why that shrouds a black hole in mystery, consider how no signal can travel faster than light. That means the event horizon is a one-way barrier for information. A black hole can swallow it, but the event horizon prevents it from spitting information out. We can never observe the interior of a black hole.

It's little wonder scientists are so keen to study event horizons and what happens there. They don't only want to understand the physics of matter engaged on a one-way trip into the maw of a black hole, but the effect on the very fabric of space itself these cosmic titans have.

The immense gravitational influence of black holes means that, as they spin, they drag the very fabric of space along with them, a phenomenon called "frame-dragging" or the Lense-Thirring effect. This introduces another rule about event horizons — not only does nothing escape this boundary, nothing there sits still either. This research brings scientists one step closer to understanding those rules in greater detail than ever before.

"We studied GW250114, the loudest binary black hole signal observed to date, about three times louder than the first gravitational-wave signal detected a decade ago," team co-leader Ling Sun of OzGrav said. "Our analysis shows that this exceptionally loud signal can be used as a powerful probe of the remnant black hole's horizon, allowing us to measure its two fundamental properties: rotation frequency and surface gravity."

The results could also shed more light on the behavior of gravity in the most extreme environment in the universe, at the very edge of a black hole.

"These measurements mark a first step towards future tests of general relativity with direct waves," Lu said.

The research was published on Wednesday (June 24) in the journal Nature.

Astronomers have used a technique called echo mapping to detect hints that supermassive black holes, such as the cosmic titan at the heart of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), are surrounded by dense clouds and clusters of dark matter. The research could teach us more about this mysterious substance and the environments around supermassive black holes.

Dark matter is the universe's most mysterious stuff, outweighing ordinary matter in the cosmos by a ratio of five to one — but remaining effectively invisible because it doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation, including the light we use to see. The only way scientists can even infer the presence of dark matter is via its interaction with gravity, and the impact that this interaction has on objects made of traditional matter like stars. For instance, the gravitational effect of dark matter allows stars at the edges of galaxies to whip around at much greater speeds while not flying loose than the visible matter of those galaxies would allow.

This team decided to test the gravitational influence of dark matter at the hearts of galaxies, environments dominated by supermassive black holes which can have masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun. Ordinary matter around these supermassive black holes is often very visible, especially when spiraling into the maw of one of these cosmic titans from a flattened cloud called an accretion disk. This is because the gravitational influence of those black holes generates immense amounts of friction, causing them to grow brightly. That wouldn't work for dark matter; it can't feel friction because it doesn't interact with itself or with ordinary matter, and it can't glow because it doesn't absorb or emit light.

Clearly, dark matter can't be spotted around supermassive black holes even using the most advanced telescopes such as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which has captured glowing rings of material around Sgr A* and around a more distant supermassive black hole that rules the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).

While discussing the problem of detecting dark matter around supermassive black holes, Mayank Sharma, a physics graduate student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), hit on an interesting solution.

"We could actually test this prediction using a technique in astronomy, which allows you to measure the distance to the surrounding gas by looking for echoes of light," Sharma said in a statement. The technique Sharma refers to is "reverberation mapping," and it has become a trusted method of determining the mass of black holes.

Echoes of dark matter

Reverberation mapping is based upon the fact that as matter falls into a black hole, it releases a burst of energy that causes the accretion disk it comes from to pulse. This pulse of light travels from the accretion disk to gas in the wider environment of the black hole. This gas absorbs that light and also pulses, with this secondary pulse serving as an echo of the first.

Because we know the speed of light, when astronomers see the first pulse of light and then its echo, they can use the time between pulses to estimate the distance between the black hole and the gas on the outskirts of its environment. The size of a black hole and the distance between it and outer gas clouds can be used to determine its mass, and could also be used to determine the mass of dark matter clustered around it.

The team applied their method to 14 different galaxies, finding in five cases that mass increases moving away from the central black hole in a way that couldn't be accounted for by visible matter alone. Despite the early success of this research, it far from proves that supermassive black holes are indeed gathering places for dark matter. The team's findings do point an interesting way forward for the investigation into the universe's most mysterious substance and its most mysterious regions.

"These galaxies are definitely showing a hint that there is extra material that cannot be explained by just the supermassive black hole," Sharma said. "The prospects are exciting."

The team's research was published in the journal Physical Review D.

Supermassive black holes are notoriously messy when devouring a star, but they can also linger over their meals, letting out massive radio "burps" months or even years after their cosmic feast appears finished.

Now, scientists tracking these events have found there is no one-size-fits-all model for how black holes digest stellar material. Speaking Monday (June 15) at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in California, Kate Alexander, an astronomer at the University of Arizona who has been studying these events, said the behavior depends instead on their shifting dietary phases.

"Sometimes, after it seems like they are done eating, they may get indigestion and they may let out a large radio 'burp,'" Alexander said during a press conference on Monday. "These late-time radio burps can appear when the black hole eats too fast or eats too slowly, so you should always eat the right speed if you want to avoid indigestion."

Her recent research focuses on Tidal Disruption Events, or TDEs, which are cosmic catastrophes that occur when an unlucky star wanders too close to a supermassive black hole. As the star nears the behemoth, intense gravitational fields shred it into a spaghetti-like stream of gas debris in a process known as "spaghettification."

Because these events are rare, occurring roughly once every 100,000 years in any given galaxy, astronomers must monitor a large number of galaxies just to spot them. Historically, targeted radio follow-up of these disruptions ceased if no emission was detected within the first year or so, leaving their long-term behavior unstudied.

"When we first started looking at them, we just stopped looking," she said. "But, it turns out that we should have kept looking, because this is often when some of the most really interesting things are happening."

Over the past six years, astronomers have been using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) telescope in New Mexico to conduct the first large-scale, systematic radio observations of several dozen nearby TDEs. A 2024 paper, by radio astronomer Yvette Cendes of the University of Oregon and co-authored by Alexander, first reported that roughly 40% of all TDEs are detected in radio months to years after the initial disruption, long after the visible light has dimmed.

Now, published this year in The Astrophysical Journal, the new study led by Alexander sets out to explain why these long-dormant systems reactivate. To solve the mystery, the researchers combed through decades of data, analyzing 91 TDE candidates discovered between 1990 and 2019 before narrowing their focus to a gold-standard sample of 31 events with comprehensive, multiwavelength tracking.

By blending VLA radio data with archival optical and ultraviolet observations, plus fresh follow-up X-ray measurements, the team mapped how much gas the black holes actually consumed at any given point in time. Matching that feeding timeline against the exact moments the radio flares emerged revealed precisely how fast the black holes were eating when they unleashed their outflows, Alexander explained during the press briefing.

The data revealed that these delayed flares ignite at two opposite extremes, either while the black hole is rapidly overgorging on gas, or after its feeding rate has slowed to a crawl. In both scenarios, a fraction of the incoming gas is flung outward instead of being fully consumed, the team found. This expelled material then slams into the gas surrounding the black hole, triggering particle-accelerating shock waves that produce the radio emissions — effectively creating the cosmic "burps."

This cosmic feeding mechanic operates identically across all scales, working the exact same way whether the black hole is a relative lightweight or a behemoth millions of times more massive than our sun, Alexander noted.

"For those of us who are astrophysicists," she said, "this is really cool because we are now starting to understand how physics operates in these very different mass regimes."

The team also found that TDEs destined to flare up later leave a distinct chemical fingerprint in their early optical spectra in the form of helium emission lines. This signature indicates that the star's shredded debris is taking its time settling into a tidy, ingestible disk around the black hole — virtually guaranteeing a delayed case of cosmic indigestion, said Alexander.

"These are the black holes that are having longer lasting meals," she said.

Based on these findings, the team suggests that a window of two to six years post-discovery is the most productive timeframe to hunt for these late-rising radio signals.

Ultimately, the team says the predictive chemical blueprint could serve as an invaluable screening tool. By filtering out the quiet eaters early on, astronomers can maximize highly competitive telescope time, focusing precious resources on the black holes most likely to put on a late-stage show.

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft have obtained the most detailed image yet of the jet erupting from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87).

If this black hole sounds familiar, that is because it made history in 2019 when it was revealed as the first black hole to be imaged by humanity.

M87* is located around 55 million light-years from Earth and is ravenously feeding on infalling gas and dust. As it does so, matter is channeled to the poles of this black hole, which has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun. This matter is blasted out at speeds approaching the speed of light as powerful jets that stretch out for thousands of light-years.

Jets of M87* have been imaged before in other wavelengths of light, such as optical light and infrared, but this is our most detailed look at these jets in X-rays. And the X-rays revealed a complex flow of material through the jets that's more dynamic than previously seen.

"We could already see changes in the jet, but never with this level of detail in X-rays," Camille Poitras, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Laval University and lead of the study, said in a statement. "Structures that previously appeared blended together can now be distinguished, allowing us to better follow the jet's evolution over more than a decade of observations."

Some structures in the jets appeared to be moving at speeds five times faster than the speed of light. Of course, that isn't possible; according to Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity, nothing with mass can move at the speed of light or faster. This so-called superluminal motion isn't a universe-breaking discovery, but rather an optical illusion created when matter moves at near-light speed directly toward Earth.

The Chandra observations of the jet of M87* are a major step forward in understanding the physics of these outflows and how the particles that comprise them are accelerated to such high speeds and great energies. Additionally, because these jets are how supermassive black holes pour energy back into their surroundings, the observations could also help build a better picture of how these cosmic titans influence the evolution of their home galaxies.

"These results demonstrate how uniquely powerful Chandra remains for tracking the evolution of extreme phenomena over long timescales," team member Gerrit Schellenberger, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), said in the statement. "They help us better understand how energy released near a supermassive black hole is carried through its jet and deposited into the surrounding galaxy."

The team's research was presented at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The study is also available as a preprint on arXiv.

A faraway fluctuating quasar has been seen dimming and brightening by an extraordinary amount, changes in luminosity equivalent to 2 trillion times the brightness of the sun . It is the first time that a flickering quasar has been seen in the early universe, this one dating back 12.9 billion years – just around 900 million years after the Big Bang.

Quasars are the extremely active supermassive black holes at the heart of some galaxies, furiously feeding on gas that is being shoveled towards their maw, and growing as a result of this voracious feeding. As the gas circles the black hole's event horizon – the point beyond which nothing can escape the black hole – it grows hot as a result of friction, leading to the gas shining brightly. Additionally, magnetic fields can whip away some of the charged particles in the gas, blasting them away from the supermassive black hole in the form of powerful and bright jets. As such, quasars are some of the brightest objects in the universe.

More than a million quasars have been found across the universe, but only around 200 of these have been found existing in the first billion years after the Big Bang. While most quasars flicker, they usually do so by relatively modest amounts, and such flickering had not been seen in a quasar in the first billion years of cosmic history, until now.

"People have known that quasars in the nearby universe can flicker," Gene Leung of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement. "The flickering comes from fluctuations in the way the gas is being fed into the black hole, and how the quasar flickers tells us something about the structure of a black hole's accretion disk and the kind of 'bites' that the black hole is eating."

The quasar in question is pumping out energy equivalent to the luminosity of 12 trillion suns, and its light fluctuates by about 20%, or 2 trillion times the luminosity of our sun, a quite remarkable amount indicative of how fast this black hole is growing.

Even so, the quasar is so distant that it is still extremely faint, so detecting these huge fluctuations wasn't easy. Not only has the light traveled a long way for a long time, but the expansion of the universe has also stretched the wavelength of that light to longer, redder wavelengths, a phenomenon called "redshift."

Distant quasar flickers like a cosmic candle

Leung and his MIT colleague Anna-Christina Eilers led a team that found the elusive flickering quasar after searching the archives of NASA's now-defunct NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission. NEOWISE scanned the whole sky for about 14 years, searching for hazardous asteroids, but also capturing a lot going on in the background sky.

The redshift of the quasar's light also lowered the frequency of the fluctuations. Flickering that might have taken place on timescales of days when the light left this quasar was redshifted to months by the time this light reached us. That is why NEOWISE's many years of data were invaluable.

"We saw the quasar flickering randomly over the 14-year period, much like a candle's flame flickers without a fixed pattern," said Leung.

The flickering of the quasar at different wavelengths is connected to variations in the temperature of the gas swirling around this black hole. The closer the gas is to the black hole, the hotter it is. From this, Leung's team could deduce that the gas had settled into a very flat, pancake-shaped accretion disk around the black hole.

For an older quasar, this wouldn't be a surprise, but for such a young quasar, it is potentially revelatory. That's because supermassive black holes grow messily, and the cloud of infalling gas around a young quasar existing only 850 million years after the Big Bang should still be quite puffy, like a thick, chaotic donut-shaped torus. The gas should only flatten into a pancake shape once the quasar has matured. In other words, this quasar appears older than its years.

"I think that what this suggests is that all the messy, very rapid growth phases that we expect all black holes to go through at some point happen very, very early on, before we see them as these very bright luminous quasars," said Eilers. "That's the picture that's emerging."

Astronomers are already gaining evidence that supermassive black holes can form faster than we realized from directly collapsing clouds of gas, as evidenced by the 'little red dots' being discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the early universe. The discovery of a mature quasar that existed 12.9 billion years ago bolsters the emerging theory that supermassive black holes formed early and developed fast.

"This means something happened even earlier on that led these systems to look so mature," said Leung.

Now, Leung and Eilers hope to search for even older quasars (the oldest ever seen existed 13.2 billion years ago), perhaps with the JWST, to try and capture whatever happened to cause them to grow up so quickly.

In the meantime, their findings can be read in a paper published on Monday (8th June) in Nature Astronomy.

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope may be close to solving the mystery of "little red dots" in the early universe. The team has studied one of these strange objects, designated GLIMPSE-17775, finding evidence it is a black hole star — a ravenously feeding, growing supermassive black hole cocooned in a dense cloud of partially ionised gas.

Little red dots first started to turn up when the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began sending data back to Earth in the summer of 2022. They were said by some scientists to have "broken cosmology" because they appear in large numbers around 600 million years after the Big Bang, but they appear to disappear before the universe reaches 2 billion years old. Several explanations for little red dots have been proposed, but one that has emerged as a frontrunner is the concept of black hole stars. If black hole stars exist, the little red dot disappearance would be the result of their intense, short-lived growth spurts that cause them to burn out — or, because the growing supermassive black holes at their centers eventually clear away the dense gas and dust obscuring them, changing their appearance as they evolve into more typical active galaxies.

The problem is, however, that astronomers have been unable to gather observational evidence that little red dots are indeed black hole stars. That was until the JWST imaged little red dot GLIMPSE-17775, seen as it was just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang, while making observations of the gravitational lens galaxy cluster Abell S1063. This data represents the deepest spectrum of light from a little red dot collected to date and, according to this team, contains multiple lines of evidence pointing to a black hole star.

"I think part of the scientific community is converging on a singular picture — that little red dots can be explained by black hole star models. But none of the previous little red dots have all of the pieces of evidence in the same place," Vasily Kokorev at the University of Texas at Austin said in a statement. "With GLIMPSE-17775 we can test these models because of how deep and amazing this source's spectrum is."

Solving the little red dot puzzle with a hand from Einstein

The JWST caught a glimpse of GLIMPSE-17775 while searching for the first generation of stars in our universe, somewhat confusingly called "Population III" stars. The telescope searched for these particular stars in the galaxies that comprise galaxy cluster Abell S1063.

Separately, Abell S1063 is a gravitational lens, meaning its massive gravitational influence actually curves the fabric of space and time (united as a single, four-dimensional entity called spacetime). This, in turn, means an object "behind" the galaxy cluster that's emitting light toward our vantage point would have its light path curved in tandem with the spacetime curve. This can create a magnifying effect.

The concept of gravitational lensing was first predicted by Albert Einstein in his theory of general relativity, and it's how scientists were able to observe GLIMPSE-17775 — essentially turning 30 hours of observing time into just about 80.

"When we saw the spectrum for the first time, it was like having all the pieces of a puzzle scattered on the floor," Kokorev said. "We picked up each piece of the puzzle, measured the lines, and started combining the different pieces into a mosaic. Maybe a few pieces looked like nothing at first, but then a couple of them came together, and we realized that there was something there."

The team identified several lines of evidence in the JWST observations that indicate "little red dot" GLIMPSE-17775 is indeed a black hole star. This includes emissions from elements that don't conform with what would be expected in a rotating gas cloud. The emission lines instead indicate the scattering of electrons, which is expected when a source of radiation is enshrouded by a vast and dense cocoon of gas. Also indicative of a dense shroud of gas were signs of fluorescence and helium-absorbing radiation.

The team also saw spectral lines from iron, which the team dubbed an "iron forest." That is something expected as a result of the high-energy output of a rapidly feeding supermassive black hole: a black hole star.If little red dots are rapidly accreting supermassive black holes shrouded by dense gas envelopes, this would explain why these mystery objects are so faint in X-rays, as these cocoons should absorb this high-energy radiation.

There is something missing from observations of GLIMPSE-17775, however.

Little red dots usually have a strong characteristic dip in the spectra of light they emit, what's known as a "Balmer Break." The team thinks this feature is weaker for this little red dot than others because GLIMPSE-17775 is surrounded by a massive host galaxy. The team's data therefore fits as a missing piece of the puzzle of little red dots, slotting in nicely with our understanding of the evolution of the universe.

"Everything fits, nothing is broken, and I think that makes the puzzle that is our universe even better," Kokorev concluded. "Looking ahead, I’m eager to dive deeper and learn about what is powering the central engines of little red dots. While we think it’s a black hole, there are some other interesting theories being proposed, which is exciting. "Maybe in a year or two, we’ll have the final answer to what powers these sources."

The team's research was published on Wednesday (June 10) in The Astrophysical Journal.

When we think about a black hole, we probably picture some vast cosmic titan, greedily consuming any matter unfortunate enough to fall within its gravitational influence. Thinking deeper, we probably imagine this ravenous cosmic beast forming from the explosive collapse of the core of a massive star. Maybe we even picture a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy, formed from a multitude of mergers between smaller black holes and reaching masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun.

However, as accurate as this picture is, many scientists have long suspected that it is only the tip of the black hole iceberg, representing a single class of "astrophysical black holes" alone. These researchers theorize that black holes can also form at much more diminutive sizes that do not require the existence and death of massive stars or prior pairs of black holes. In particular, many scientists think that tiny black holes, with masses as small as that of a medium-sized asteroid, could have formed directly from density fluctuations in the hot and dense matter that filled the cosmos moments after the Big Bang. These objects have remained hypothetical as evidence of their existence has proved elusive. That hasn't stopped researchers thinking about non-astrophysical black holes and the routes to their formation, however.

One example is new research from scientists from Goethe University, Frankfurt, and the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), which suggests that minuscule black holes could form when the very fabric of space and time, united as a four-dimensional entity called "spacetime," undergoes critical collapse and organizes itself into a regular crystal-like arrangement. Though the idea isn't entirely new, the team has become the first to mathematically describe this transformation. And what is most staggering, they did it with nothing more than a pen and paper!

While astrophysical black holes form from some of the universe's most titanic and violent events, like core-collapse supernovas or black hole mergers, that set the very fabric of spacetime ringing with gravitational waves that can be "heard" from millions and even billions of light-years away, the team found these critical collapse black holes could be born with only a tiny nudge.

"Sometimes a tiny, seemingly insignificant cause is enough to trigger a huge and dramatic change," team member Daniel Grumiller of TU Wien told Space.com. "These microscopic black holes would form if you have a spacetime crystal and you inject an arbitrarily small amount of energy - a bit like what you get when you have undercooled water and you shake it so that it crystallizes."

Grumiller explained further that when liquid water is at its freezing point, only a small change is required to cause water molecules to spontaneously arrange themselves into a regular pattern and form an ice crystal. Even a tiny change in the structure of spacetime can allow a repeated pattern to develop, resulting in the emergence of a spacetime crystal, the team theorizes. This can kick-start the process of critical collapse.

"You can think of the critical spacetime crystal as water at freezing point; even though it is still water, it already 'knows' about ice, and small perturbations can convert water at 0 Celsius into ice, or vice versa," Grumiller said.

Enter stage left spacetime

Einstein suggested in his 1915 theory of gravity, general relativity, that particles of mass causethe very fabric of spacetime to curve. That means when particles move through spacetime, they affect the fabric of spacetime itself. That was the revolutionary thing about Einstein's rethink of gravity: to Newton, space and time were merely a stage upon which the actors of the universe, energy and matter, play their roles. To Einstein, spacetime was part of the production. It's that active role that allows for the formation of astrophysical black holes and their diminutive counterparts.

"We say that spacetime is curved by mass," Christian Ecker from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Goethe University Frankfurt said in a statement. "Large objects such as stars curve spacetime strongly — for example, we can observe this when light rays are deflected by massive stars. But smaller masses also produce spacetime curvature, just to a lesser extent." However, because tiny black holes are hotter than their astrophysical counterparts, they rapidly "leak" thermal radiation called "Hawking radiation" to the cold of space; these spacetime crystal black holes would rapidly evaporate.

"This spacetime crystal is a very peculiar and fascinating object. It is a kind of intermediate state, an unstable point that can evolve in two different directions,” Grumiller continued. "After some time, the instability will kick in and either the spacetime crystals disperse into radiation or collapse into a small black hole. In case the crystal collapses to a black hole, it will be classically stable."

Grumiller explained that one surprise this research delivered was just how simple their mathematical descriptions of this process were while presenting solutions to the equations of general relativity.

"We provided the first paper-and-pencil solutions for spacetime crystals. Before our work, there were only numerical simulations but not exact solutions to the Einstein equations," Grumiller said. "We were astonished that the solutions were so simple that they fit into a few lines and only involved elementary functions - this was quite unexpected given the complexity of corresponding numerical simulations that take thousands of computer processing hours."

Of course, all this is great, but proving that critical collapse black holes could exist and that this route could have created primordial black holes in the dense particle-rich conditions shortly after the Big Bang doesn't actually prove primordial black holes exist.

"If we are lucky, our experimental colleagues will, at some point, discover primordial black holes. But even if this never happens, understanding critical collapse means understanding an important and conceptually rich part of general relativity, our currently best theory of gravity," Grumiller concluded. "Our next step is to find out if our various conjectures about the behavior of critical spacetime crystals are correct."

The team's research was published in the May edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

Astronomers have discovered a distant quasar — or active nucleus of a galaxy — that's powered by a feeding supermassive black hole blasting out winds at record-breaking speeds of 30% the speed of light, around 201 million miles (323 million kilometers) per hour. This is the fastest black hole wind seen specifically in ultraviolet wavelengths.

The black hole-powered quasar, known as J2318, has an incredible mass of 1.7 billion times that of the sun and is located around 3 billion light-years away. While that is a pretty typical mass for a supermassive black hole, the speed of these winds is anything but typical, according to team member and York University researcher Patrick Hall.

"In terms of its speed, this quasar's wind could be called a category 79 hurricane," team leader and York University researcher Lucas Seaton said in a statement. "Every category of hurricane is about 20% faster than the category below it. Calling it category 79 gives an idea of just how fast it is, but of course this wind is unlike anything on Earth."

All large galaxies are thought to host a supermassive black hole at their hearts with masses of millions, or even billions, of times that of the sun, but not all of these cosmic titans power quasars or emit such incredibly powerful winds. Quasars occur when these central supermassive black holes are surrounded by vast amounts of gas and dust called accretion disks. These disks gradually feed the black holes.

Black hole winds vs. Earth winds

As you might imagine, masses of millions or billions of times that of the sun generate incredible gravitational forces, and this means accretion disks can have powerful tidal forces of their own that create friction and cause them to glow brightly across the electromagnetic spectrum. This radiation also pushes matter away from accretion disks in the form of intense black hole "winds."

"In quasars, we often see winds of gas pushed away from the black hole by the light of the quasar," Seaton said. "The wind in J2318 can be seen at ultraviolet wavelengths at velocities up to 30% the speed of light. Even faster winds can be seen at X-ray wavelengths, but J2318 is the fastest ever discovered at ultraviolet wavelengths."

The fact that black hole winds are radiation-driven, pushed by particles of light called photons bouncing off atoms (and not caused by air pressure) is what makes these cosmic gales so different from Earth's atmospheric winds.

"Quasars put out so many photons that those tiny pushes add up to extreme velocities," Seaton said. "The problem is, the photons can also remove all the electrons from the atoms, making them invisible. How to push the gas to the speeds we see while keeping the carbon and silicon ions we see intact … it's quite a puzzle!"

To tackle this puzzle, the team turned to data observations made by the SDSS-IV Time-Domain Spectroscopic Survey and the SDSS-V Black Hole Mapper as part of the wider Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

"Just as a rainbow spreads the sun's light into different wavelengths, colours, the SDSS spreads out the light from certain stars, galaxies, and quasars into what we call their spectra," Seaton said. "From those spectra, with practice, students learn to spot unusual quasars."

These detailed spectra from J2318 revealed the high-speed winds of this quasar in ultraviolet light. The study of black hole winds like this one is important for understanding how galaxies evolve. That is because these winds are how supermassive black holes exchange energy with their galactic homes. In particular, this energy could push away gas and dust that serves as the raw material for star formation, thus quenching star birth in galaxies.

"These extreme outflows carry incredible amounts of energy that can affect the galaxies around them. They serve as a sort of missing link: the elusive feedback between the active central region of a galaxy and the rest of the galaxy," Paola Rodríguez Hidalgo, associate professor at the University of Washington at Bothell, said in the statement. "While this process has been included in simulations of galaxy formation for decades, a lot more work needs to be done to understand it from observations and make sure the simulations handle it correctly."

The team and other astronomers will continue to hunt for high-speed black hole winds in ultraviolet radiation, but aren't confident they will find any as fast as the one from J2318."It won't be easy to find a faster ultraviolet outflow than that of J2318, but we are continuing this search from the nearby universe to the most distant reaches of the universe that we can see," Flores concluded.

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 4) in The Astrophysical Journal.

After searching for 50 years, astronomers have finally discovered evidence of powerful winds blowing from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. The discovery represents a deepening of our understanding of the physics at play both around supermassive black holes and at the heart of the Milky Way.

Scientists have long proposed that black holes produce energy as they consume matter that pushes material away from their vicinity, a process which has been dubbed "black hole winds." That even applies to Sgr A*, which exists on a diet of gas and dust so meager For a human, the equivalent would be consuming one grain of rice every million years.

The problem is, scientists have been unable to collect evidence of black hole winds blowing through the heart of the Milky Way, resulting in a mystery that has persisted in astronomy for around half a century — that is, until now.

"Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow. And there is no perfect vacuum in the universe," team co-leader and Northwestern University researcher Mark Gorski said in a statement. "With new observations, this is the first time we’ve had a clean enough view to see the wind's imprint. We looked at the data and said, 'There it is. There is the thing that everybody’s been looking for for 50 years.'"

Seeing black hole winds is far from a breeze

Scientists have been aware for some time that feeding black holes launch powerful outflows of material around them, including jets and winds. Winds are caused when matter falling to the black hole is accelerated to near light-speed, generating pressure that pushes infalling material away. That has been seen with ravenously feeding black holes before, but not the barely feeding Sgr A*. Its sparse consumption of material and the fact it is obscured by the plane of the Milky Way from our vantage point have made tracing this wind difficult.

Gorski's Northwestern colleague and team co-leader Lena Murchikova pointed out that the scientists were the first to detect molecular gas very close to Sgr A* feeding the supermassive black hole. That makes Sgr A* reassuringly like other supermassive black holes.

"The wind is not powerful, and its direction probably wanders with time. It shows that our black hole is not unique, and our place in the universe is not unique," Murchikova added. "To observe our own black hole, we have to look through the plane of our galaxy. That means we have to peer through gas, dust and ionized structures, and you can’t really see through all of that easily.”

To tackle these difficulties, the team turned to five years of deep observations of the heart of the Milky Way collected by the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), 66 radio antennas located in northern Chile. This delivered the sharpest image yet of the cold molecular gas with around 3 light-years of Sgr A*.One aspect of these observations that stunned the scientists was a three-light-year-long, cone-shaped cavity in this cloud of cold gas. They reasoned that this cavity must have been cleared by hotter gas in a black hole wind sweeping through the region, either pushing the cold gas in front of it or heating the cold gas.

"If you blow hot material from the black hole, it's not going to want to exist with the cold material," Gorski said. "It's either going to push the cold material out or heat it up. And, if it's too hot, you will no longer see the cold gas."

The region around Sgr A* is packed with stars — and stars also blow winds of material from them — but the team reasons that these stellar winds would not carry enough energy to carve out such a large cavity.

"It's a huge absence of material. We calculated how much energy was needed to create this cavity. It is more than can be provided by the stars in that area," Gorski explained. "Basically, there has to be input from the supermassive black hole. And, if you follow the shape of the cone, it's pointed directly at the black hole.”

To double-check their results, the scientists turned to observations of the same region made by NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope.

"Exceptional claims require exceptional evidence," Gorski said. "We wanted to make sure that we weren't just looking at some sort of imaging artifact. Then, the X-ray image from Chandra just slotted in perfectly. The molecular features lined up."

This backed up the results from ALMA by revealing X-ray emissions coming from the location of the cavity in the cold gas.

"When you find something that no one has seen before, the first thought that runs through your mind is not 'Oh my god, we made a discovery,'" Murchikova said. "It's 'Oh my god, what's wrong with my analysis?' But when we overlaid our image with the X-ray image, it started to make sense."

While the team's results confirm that Sgr A* is extremely quiet compared to the supermassive black holes that sit in bright, turbulent regions of other galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN), this black hole wind is no slouch. In fact, the scientists think that it has been raging for around 20,000 years.

"The majority of other galaxies spend most of their lives in a state where they are not particularly active," Murchikova said. "But we can only see them when they are in a fireworks stage. It is very attractive to study black holes when they are in the fireworks stage, but that’s not actually their dominant state. "Sgr A* finally gives us a window into the life of a black hole in this quiet state."

The team's research was published on Thursday (June 4) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

New research suggests that black holes born during the Big Bang could live much longer than previously estimated. In fact, these tiny primordial black holes may live long enough to become energy-spewing white holes with the mass of a human eyebrow hair.

Primordial black holes are proposed to have formed through fluctuations in the incredibly hot and dense matter that filled the universe moments after the Big Bang. This is in contrast to stellar-mass or "astrophysical" black holes that are familiar to us the collapse of massive stars like the. Primordial black holes remain undetected and therefore hypothetical.

Many scientists believe that the failure to detect astrophysical black holes is because they have evaporated and therefore no longer exist in the 13.8 billion year-old cosmos. This is possible because black holes are proposed to "leak" a type of thermal radiation called "Hawking radiation" proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. The smaller the mass of a black hole, the hotter it is, and thus the faster it leaks Hawking radiation and the more rapidly it evaporates, a process speculated to end with an explosive finale.

Stellar-mass black holes, with up to hundreds of times the mass of the sun, are massive and cool enough to leak slowly enough to outlive the universe itself many times over; primordial black holes with masses way smaller than this, on the other hand, aren't so lucky — or so we thought. Eberly College of Science researcher Daniel Paraizo and colleagues suggest there is a way that primordial black holes of just the right mass could survive this process to undergo a startling transformation.

"We found that the lifetime of black holes is much longer than previously thought," Paraizo told Space.com. "The phenomena that we identify are relevant for black holes possibly formed in the early universe. These objects have not been observed yet, but their search is a topic of intense interest as dark matter candidates. Black holes start to die by emitting thermal Hawking radiation. The puzzle is what happens once they reach the Planck mass, which is around 20 micrograms."

A black hole the size of a flea egg

The Planck mass of around 0.000000022 kilograms is a fundamental unit of mass in physics considered fascinating because it is the point at which the rules that govern subatomic particles and quantum physics as well as those that govern gravity and general relativity as a whole become equally important. Physicists consider this the upper limit for the mass of any single elementary particle, with any particle above this collapsing to birth a microscopic black hole.

In everyday terms, the Planck mass is about equivalent to a human eyebrow hair, or a flea egg, which is about one-fifty-thousandth as heavy as a jelly bean.

Paraizo explained that once a primordial black hole has evaporated to the Planck mass, becoming a so-called Planckian black hole, there are several proposed fates it could encounter. This includes the disappearance of the outer boundary that defines what a black hole is, the light or electromagnetic radiation trapping region known as the event horizon. "The mechanism that we study for the death of this Planck-sized black hole is the gradual disappearance of the horizon that traps radiation," Paraizo said.

The team performed mathematical calculations that revealed a primordial black hole formed with the initial mass of a medium-size asteroid, around 1 billion tons, decays in about a billion years and emits thermal Hawking radiation until it reaches the Planck mass. However, a primordial black hole born with a mass of just 1 ton would immediately explode, instantly reaching the Planck mass. It is what happens next that sets the team's findings apart from previous research. "It is then that our results predict something new: previous arguments indicated that the remaining 20 micrograms are radiated in at least 1 second; our estimate shows instead that these 20 microgram remnants are practically stable," Paraizo explains. "Once the black hole reaches the 20-microgram threshold, we find that it starts emitting purifying radiation [named because it is said to 'purify' the quantum state of the universe] due to behavior that is characteristic of a white hole.

"Therefore, even though we do not yet know the physics near a white hole, we identify an object that has exactly the same properties from far away."

White holes are another hypothetical entity in physics, suggested to be effectively a "time-reversed black hole" that, rather than trap matter and radiation within them as black holes do, endlessly push matter and radiation away.

Any further predictions about the fate of these primordial black holes taking on a white hole appearance would require a theory that unites general relativity and quantum mechanics, known as "quantum gravity," that has steadfastly evaded physicists since the early 20th century.

"Simple physical assumptions about the physics far away from a black hole can tell us a lot about their lifetime and about their transition to a stable phase that looks like a 20 microgram white hole," Paraizo said. "The fact that we can infer these properties, using only minimal ingredients from quantum gravity, is remarkable."

A pre-peer-reviewed version of the team's research is available on the research repository site arXiv.

Astronomers have struck "black gold" — a treasure trove of black hole mergers. And the discovery was made by analyzing ripples in the very fabric of space and time, or spacetime, called gravitational waves.

This massive haul of mergers contained within the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalogue-5.0 (GWTC-5), released on Tuesday (May 26), could change our understanding of how black holes meet and collide. The latest catalog contains 161 new gravitational wave signals launched by merging black holes "heard" by iconic gravitational wave detectors LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), Virgo, and KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) between April 2024 and the end of January 2025.

It brings the total number of black hole mergers detected via gravitational waves up to 390.

Highlights of GWTC-5 include the detection of "second generation mergers," or collisions between two black holes that had formed in previous mergers, and the most precisely localized merger ever. While the former could help us better understand merger chains that allow black holes to grow to masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun, the latter could help develop a method of using such events and their gravitational wave signals to measure the rate at which the universe is expanding.

"This bumper update has once again broadened and deepened our knowledge of the universe, and given us many more glimpses of its most elusive objects: colliding black holes," Daniel Williams, a research fellow at the Institute for Gravitational Research, said in a statement. "We're now detecting so many of these signals that we're not just learning about individual collisions; it's the astronomical equivalent of uncovering an ancient civilization.

"Today's new results are like finding a previously undiscovered hoard, revealing not just individual lives, but the structure of an entire lost world."

What are gravitational waves?

Gravitational waves were first proposed in 1915 as part of Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, known as general relativity. General relativity suggests that objects with mass cause spacetime (the four-dimensional unification of space and time) to warp. Gravity arises from this warping, meaning the larger the mass, the greater the curvature of spacetime and the stronger the gravitational influence.

General relativity goes beyond this, also suggesting that when objects accelerate in spacetime, they create ripples that radiate outward at the speed of light: gravitational waves. Though Einstein initially predicted this rippling of spacetime, he was wrong about one aspect of gravitational waves: he thought humanity would never detect them.

LIGO made the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015; the signal came from the collision and merger of two massive black holes located around 1.3 billion light-years away. Since then, along with its fellow detectors Virgo and KAGRA, LIGO has detected gravitational waves from many mergers between pairs of black holes, pairs of ultra-dense neutron stars — and even mixed mergers between a black hole and a neutron star.

The sensitivity of the gravitational wave detectors has only increased in recent years, with detections currently occurring as frequently as three to four times each week during observational run phases between down periods that allow further advancement of sensitivity.

"Just 10 years ago we made the first detection of gravitational waves from one of these events, and it's a real testament to the work of hundreds of scientists around the world that we're now detecting and analyzing hundreds of them," Williams said.

Gravitational wave detections are making some noise

Two impressive demonstrations of the importance of the data from GWTC-5 are the signals GW241011 and GW241110 detected on Oct. 11, 2024, and Nov. 11, 2024, respectively. They are the result of two mergers 700 million light-years away and 2.4 billion light-years away, and the rapid spin of the involved black holes and the orientation of that rotation implied that these four black holes were second-generation objects, meaning they were created by prior mergers.

"These two observations showed characteristic signs that the larger black hole in each pair was formed not directly from a massive star, but from a previous merger of two black holes," Storm Colloms of the Institute for Gravitational Research said in the statement. "The signatures of black holes formed from previous mergers persist in the population as a whole, indicating that GW241011 and GW241110 are not one-of-a-kind, but trace an underlying trend. Now, we have growing evidence that there are ways that the universe creates merging black holes in addition to those that come from massive binary stars."

This indicates that these two mergers occurred in densely packed stellar environments, something that will be difficult to investigate because it isn't easy to localize a gravitational wave signal back to its point of origin. That isn't always the case, as was demonstrated by the signal GW240615, detected on June 15, 2024.

The result of a 26-solar-mass black hole merging with a 30-solar-mass black hole over 3 billion light-years away, gravitational wave astronomers were able to pinpoint GW240615 to a region of the sky measuring just 6 square degrees. That makes GW240615 the most precisely localized gravitational wave signal to date.

"The updated GWTC-5.0 catalogue gives us a much larger collection of gravitational-wave signals to help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: how fast is the universe expanding?" Alex Papadopoulos of the Institute for Gravitational Research said in the statement. "The rate of this expansion is described by a value called the Hubble constant. Gravitational waves allow us to measure this by estimating how far away merging objects are, either directly from the signal itself or by identifying the galaxy where the merger took place.

"Each event contributes a small amount of information, so together these additional signals significantly improve our results. Together, these improvements help us measure the Hubble constant more precisely than ever before using gravitational waves, bringing us closer to understanding one of modern physics’ most important open questions."

Also standing out in this latest catalog is the gravitational wave signal GW250114 detected on January 14, 2025. This is believed to be the result of a 34 solar mass black hole colliding and merging with a 32-solar-mass black hole around 1 billion light-years away. This signal was so clear that it allowed researchers to perform the most accurate test of general relativity ever, in addition to confirming a concept introduced by Stephen Hawking called the black hole area theorem.

"With the loudness of GW250114 we are able to compare the warped space-time before and after the black holes merged, and found that the total area of the event horizons [the light-trapping outer boundary of a black hole] increased in accordance with Hawking's laws of black hole mechanics," John Veitch of the University of Glasgow said in the statement. "After the merger the final black hole rings like a bell, giving off gravitational waves instead of sound. Analyzing these waves confirmed that although energy is given off in gravitational waves during the merger, the total entropy of the black holes increases in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics.

"This shows that even for black holes the laws of thermodynamics still apply, but unlike normal objects, the more energy they hold, the colder they become."

It is very likely that LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA will continue to make gravitational wave discoveries that redefine our understanding of the universe and its most violent events. The detectors are set to begin a six-month intermediate observing run (IR1) later this year. This will bridge the gap between the end of Observing Run 4, which concluded on Nov. 18, 2025, and the beginning of Observing Run 5, which will operate between 2028 and 2031.

The future is bright for gravitational waves — or should that be "loud?"

Observations of ancient galaxies called "Little Red Dots" by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could finally answer the question: which comes first, the black hole or its galaxy? It turns out that the answer isn't what scientists expected and could thus represent a complete paradigm shift in our understanding of how black holes grow.

Little Red Dots were first spotted in 2022 by the JWST, immediately presenting themselves to astronomers as something completely new, perhaps a type of galaxy never seen before. The mystery of these objects deepened when scientists discovered that they are remarkably common in the infant universe but seem to disappear around 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. But Little Red Dots are far from the only cosmic mystery that the JWST has dropped into the lap of scientists.

The $10 billion space telescope has also discovered a wealth of supermassive black holes with masses millions to billions of times that of the sun prior to the universe being 1 billion years old. That is problematic because the feeding and merging processes that allow black holes to grow to supermassive status had always been thought to take longer than 1 billion years.

This new study of Little Red Dots by the JWST indicates that maybe supermassive black holes were born directly without needing a massive star to live for millions of years before collapsing to birth a stellar-mass black hole. It also means that these early supermassive black holes would not need to gorge on copious amounts of gas and dust from their host galaxies to grow. That means these black holes could form before the galaxies that will eventually host them come together.

"This is a remarkable finding," team member Roberto Maiolino of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "It's a paradigm shift, a total revisiting of the classical scenarios of how black holes form and grow." The team's research was published on Wednesday (May 27) in the journals Nature and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

Little Red Dots put black holes on the spot with help from Einstein

To reach their conclusion, scientists focused on the Little Red Dot designated Abell2744-QSO1 (QSO1), which existed 700 million years after the Big Bang. This means that the light from this ancient galaxy, which is just 1,300 light-years wide, has been travelling to Earth for just over 13 billion years.

QSO1 is easier to study than other Little Red Dots because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

First suggested by Einstein in 1915, gravitational lensing occurs when an object of great mass sits between a more distant background object and Earth. As light passes this middle or "lensing" object, its path is curved by the warp in spacetime the lensing body causes; the closer to the object the light passes, the more curved its path is. This means light from the background objects can arrive at our telescopes at different times, thus magnifying the background object.

In the case of QSO1, this Little Red Dot is being gravitationally lensed by the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, also known as Pandora's Cluster.

Researchers had initially thought that QSO1 is actually just a supermassive black hole with a mass 40 million times greater than the sun, surrounded by a cloud of hydrogen and helium gas. However, scientists couldn't be entirely sure about the mass of this black hole.

"Before now, all of the mass measurements of black holes in the early universe have been indirect, based on assumptions from what we know about them in the local universe," team member Francesco D'Eugenio, also of the University of Cambridge, said. "We didn't know if those assumptions really apply to the distant universe."

This team reasoned that if the black hole heart of QSO1 is as massive as initially thought, then its mass should be observable in the motion of the gas swirling around it. They therefore used the JWST's NIRSpec (Near Infrared Spectrograph) instrument to map the motion of this gas, finding it orbits a central point similar to how the planets of the solar system orbit the sun, a phenomenon called Keplerian motion.

"This is important because it tells us that most of the mass of QSO1 is concentrated in the black hole at the center," team co-leader Ignas Juodžbalis of Cambridge University said. "If the mass were more distributed, as it would be if there were a lot of stars, the gas would not have this perfect Keplerian rotation."

This allowed the team to directly measure the mass of QSO1's central black hole for the first time.

"This is a phenomenal result," Maiolino added. "It is the first direct measurement of a black hole mass within the first billion years after the Big Bang, and it is consistent with the previous measurements."

This revealed that at 50 million solar masses, the supermassive black hole accounts for an incredible 66% of the total mass of this Little Red Dot. That is a ratio that is thousands of times greater than the ratio of supermassive black hole mass to galaxy mass found in the local universe.

That ratio indicates that this black hole can't have been born from a collapsing star and gradual feeding from the surrounding galaxy, indicating it was born "big" and now has what will eventually grow to be a galaxy taking shape around it.

There are still mysteries to solve surrounding the black hole of QSO1, particularly questions of how it formed. The team thinks that the black hole could have grown from a "heavy seed" born from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. Or alternatively, it could have been birthed directly during the initial moments of the Big Bang through an as-yet unknown process

What the team is relatively sure of is that QSO1 cannot be rare among Little Red Dots in the early universe. They are now assessing other Little Red Dots to determine if these also harbor supermassive black holes with galaxies in the process of forming around them.