Black Holes In The Sky
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Black Holes In The Sky
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Black holes are among the weirdest things in astronomy. Predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, these objects are so massive and compact that nothing, not even light, can escape. Since their prediction from theory, stellar-mass black holes have been found scattered throughout the Milky Way and supermassive black holes containing millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun have been found inhabiting the Milky Way’s center and the cores of most large galaxies . Some are dark; others blaze their way out of quiescence as they guzzle gas from their surroundings — we see these as X-ray sources and brilliant quasars. Peruse the stories below to read about the latest observations and theory.
The most compelling dormant stellar-mass black hole candidate in the Milky Way orbits a Sun-like star only 1,570 light-years away.
By: Jure Japelj
September 29, 2022
Astronomers have detected a bubble of hot gas circling our galaxy’s central black hole soon after seeing a flare, suggesting both arose from the same process.
By: Camille M. Carlisle
September 22, 2022
Pulses originating almost a billion light-years away hint at extreme physics near a supermassive black hole.
By: Monica Young
September 13, 2022
Blazars, the gas-guzzling black holes at the center of galaxies, could make most of the tiny particles known as neutrinos we catch on Earth.
By: Monica Young
July 20, 2022
Astronomers have found a dormant black hole orbiting a massive blue star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
By: Colin Stuart
July 19, 2022
New research shows how black holes with tens of thousands of Suns' worth of mass can form in the universe's early years.
By: Monica Young
July 7, 2022
X-ray observations add to growing evidence that the most massive black holes have a different past than their lightweight peers.
By: Camille M. Carlisle
July 5, 2022
Hubble observations have revealed a stellar-mass compact object — a black hole or possibly a neutron star — wandering our galaxy.
By: Colin Stuart
June 15, 2022
Under the right conditions, stars could become immortal. How is this possible, and what does it mean for these stars’ surroundings?
The Black Hole Files with Camille Carlisle
Using a worldwide array of telescopes, the Event Horizon Telescope team has given us our first look at Sagittarius A*.
By: Camille M. Carlisle
May 13, 2022
An independent team has found additional black hole mergers in LIGO data.
By: Camille M. Carlisle
April 30, 2022
Astronomers combined forces to confirm that a black hole proposed to lie a mere 1,000 light-years away isn’t really there.
By: Camille M. Carlisle
March 4, 2022
Astronomers have imaged the magnetic field along which gas flows to a galaxy's central black hole.
By: Monica Young
March 2, 2022
Astronomers have discovered a pair of supermassive black holes that whirl around each other every two years.
By: Colin Stuart
February 28, 2022
Astronomers have found a black hole leaning decidedly askew in its orbit with a star.
By: Camille M. Carlisle
February 24, 2022
A high-resolution infrared image has revealed a dust screen obscuring a gas-devouring supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy NGC 1068, confirming 30-year-old predictions.
By: Jure Japelj
February 16, 2022
New observations suggest a black hole 100,000 times the mass of the Sun lurks in the center of a globular cluster of the Andromeda Galaxy.
By: Govert Schilling
January 27, 2022
Astronomers are searching nearby dwarf galaxies for the ancient origins of supermassive black holes.
By: Govert Schilling
January 11, 2022
Astronomers have identified the origin of a mysterious flash that occurred three years ago.
By: Govert Schilling
December 13, 2021
A satellite galaxy dwarfed by the Milky Way has a black hole nearly as massive as the one at the center of our galaxy.
By: Asa Stahl
December 8, 2021
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Andy Briggs has spent the past 30 years communicating astronomy, astrophysics and information technology to people. You can hear his weekly astronomy and space news update, on Mondays, on the global internet radio channel AstroRadio (http://www.astroradio.earth), where he also contributes to other programmes. He has been active in many astronomy societies in the UK and is a frequent contributor to Astronomy Ireland magazine. Andy also lectures regularly on astrophysics-related themes such as gravitational waves and black holes. He lives in Catalonia, Spain, with his daughter.
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A black hole have such strong gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape it. That’s why black holes are black. We can’t see them directly. But we can see the effects black holes have on the space around them. Black holes can be as large as the mass of millions or billions of stars. Or they can be as small as a few stellar masses crushed to an extreme density during supernova explosions. And last year we learned that intermediate-mass black holes exist, too. Plus, there may even be micro black holes.
In his general theory of relativity from 1915, Albert Einstein was the first to suggest that our universe contains such strange, dense, massive objects. Black holes emerge from Einstein’s equations of general relativity as a natural consequence of the death and collapse of massive stars. In 1916, German mathematician Karl Schwarzschild was the first person to formulate black holes mathematically. Theoretical physicist John Wheeler first coined the name black hole many years later, in 1967.
Up until the 1970s, black holes were mathematical curiosities only. Then, in 1971, scientists discovered the first physical black hole, Cygnux X-1 .
We know of three types of black holes. The first is the so-called stellar-mass black hole. These are the remnants of huge stars. When, at the end of its life, a star with more than about five times the mass of our sun explodes as a supernova , gravity compresses its core suddenly and violently.
Depending on the star’s mass, the collapse may halt and form a neutron star . But if its mass is sufficient, the core’s collapse will continue, forming a black hole. Stellar-mass black holes have masses ranging from a minimum of about five times the mass of our sun up to about 60 times the sun’s mass. Their diameter is typically between 10 and 30 miles (16-48 km).
Scientists announced the discovery of an intermediate-mass black hole in 2021. This type of black hole bridges the gap between smaller, stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes that lurk at the center of galaxies. The newly discovered “goldilocks” black hole has a mass of 55,000 suns. The astronomers found the intermediate black hole by detecting something located far behind it: the signals from a gamma ray burst . The gravitational lensing of the burst’s emission clued scientists in to the intermediate-mass black hole.
The third type of black hole is the supermassive black hole. These can have the mass of billions of suns. Astronomers believe that most galaxies have supermassive black holes at their cores. The one at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A* , has some 4 million times our sun’s mass and is some 37 million miles in diameter.
Another example of a supermassive black hole is at the center of the quasar known as TON 618 . Its central black hole has an estimated 66 billion solar masses. Supermassive black holes may have formed in the early history of the universe from huge collapsing clouds of interstellar hydrogen, although their exact origin is unclear and is an area of much active research. They may also have accumulated extra mass over the eons from mergers with other black holes.
There may be yet another category of black hole, that of the micro black hole . These would be smaller in size to a stellar-mass black hole. As of yet, they are still only hypothetical and none has been proven to exist.
By definition, we can’t observe what’s inside a black hole, because no light – no information of any kind – can escape. But astrophysical theories suggest that, at the core of a black hole, all the black hole’s mass is concentrated into a tiny point of infinite density. This point is known as a singularity .
It is this point – this singularity – that generates the black hole’s incredibly strong gravitational field. Consider, however, that the singularity might not exist. That’s because all known physics breaks down under the extreme conditions at the center of a black hole, where quantum effects doubtless play a large part. As we do not yet possess a quantum theory of gravity , it is impossible to describe what actually exists at core of a black hole.
The boundary of a black hole is its event horizon . It is not a physical edge. It’s just a point in space beyond which it is impossible to escape the black hole’s gravity. Once anything falling into the black hole passes the event horizon, it can never leave the black hole again. It draws inexorably and inevitably toward the black hole’s center. Within the event horizon, any solid object is torn apart by the fierce gravity and reduced to its constituent subatomic particles. At the event horizon, the escape velocity of the black hole reaches the speed of light.
With no emission from a black hole, scientists can only observe their gravitational effects on nearby objects in space. If there are stars or gas near the black hole, it may be actively “feeding” on them. That is, a black hole may draw in material from these nearby objects. In this case, a black hole will have an accretion disk . This is where material spirals inward before the black hole eats it, like water down a drain. The accretion disk may rotate at significant percentages of the speed of light: Friction between colliding particles in the disk raises its temperature to million of degrees, radiating huge quantities of X-rays that can be detected with special telescopes.
In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope project revealed the first-ever direct image of a black hole, the supermassive black hole at the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 . A global array of radio telescopes acquired the image. It demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that black holes exist. Scientists were able to directly test General Relativity’s models of black hole behavior and found that M87’s black hole complied perfectly.
Bottom line: A black hole is an area of space with a gravitational field so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape it. Black holes come in three sizes, possibly four.
A list of currently known black holes. Although you can't see black holes, it is nonetheless interesting to know which constellations they are found in.
Black holes (BHs) are formed by the gravitational core collapse of massive stars during a Type II supernova. As such, they are dead (degenerate) because they no longer generate fusion. Most galaxies in the universe have a supermassive black hole at their center. And there are two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. As such, this list only includes the smaller black holes thus far found in our galaxy, with a couple of notable exceptions:
Sgr A* - supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy
M87* - supermassive black hole at the center of the Virgo A galaxy (first BH imaged)
HR 6819 is actually a black hole and two stars forming a trinary system. These stars are visible to the naked eye.
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