What Is a Black Hole?

The Short Answer:
A black hole is an area of such immense gravity that nothing -- not even light -- can escape from it.

https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/black-holes/en/

#space #blackhole #astroart #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #education

Download a poster of this animation from NASA Space Place:

8.5 x 11 inches:
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/black-holes/en/BlackHoles-poster_8.5x11.pdf

8.5 x 13 inches
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/black-holes/en/BlackHoles-poster_8.5x13.pdf

11 x 17 inches
https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/black-holes/en/BlackHoles-poster_11x17.pdf

https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/black-holes/en/

you might also like:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/resources/teachable-moment/how-scientists-captured-the-first-image-of-a-black-hole/

#space #blackhole #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #education

The Spinning Black Hole

"Black holes are macroscopic objects with masses varying from a few solar masses to millions of solar masses.To the extent they may be considered as stationary and isolated, to that extent, they are all, every single one of them, described exactly by the Kerr solution.
This is the only instance we have of an exact description of a macroscopic object.

Macroscopic objects, as we see them all around us, are governed by a variety of forces, derived from a variety of approximations to a variety of physical theories.

In contrast, the only elements in the construction of black holes are our basic concepts of space and time.
They are, thus, almost by definition, the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe. And since the general theory of relativity provides a single unique two-parameter family of solutions for their description, they are the simplest objects as well."
—S. Chandrasekhar

Images below explained from left to right downwards:

1. Black holes are tremendous objects whose immense gravity can distort and twist space-time, the fabric that shapes our universe.

2. Scientists measure the spin rates of supermassive black holes by spreading the X-ray light into different colors.

3. This image taken by the ultraviolet-light monitoring camera on the European Space Agency's (ESA's) XMM-Newton telescope shows the beautiful spiral arms of the galaxy NGC1365.

4. NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has helped to show, for the first time, that the spin rates of black holes can be measured conclusively.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CfA/INAF

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-nustar-helps-solve-riddle-of-black-hole-spin/

* You may want to download and study this scientific elaboration:

PROJECT F
The Spinning Black Hole
https://www.eftaylor.com/pub/SpinNEW.pdf

#space #blackhole #astroart #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

Journey of an observer falling inside a(n ideal) Kerr black hole and emerging in a parallel universe. (The black hole has a mass of roughly one million solar masses (Schwarzschild radius = 10 light seconds) and an angular momentum at 80% of maximality (a/M=0.8). The observer has an energy of 1.2 times its mass and zero angular momentum along the black hole's axis.)

The upper left quadrant is the observer's front view (for a somewhat arbitrary definition of "front"), the upper right quadrant is their rear view. The lower left quadrant displays the trajectory on a polar plane cut (external horizon is red, internal horizon is green, static limit is dashed and is not seen in the video, cut discontinuity is purple, and trajectory is blue) and in a Penrose diagram (outer (I) blocks are shown in blue, inner (III) blocks are shown in pink, and intermediate (II) blocks are shown in light or dark grey according as they are white hole or black hole regions; the trajectory is again shown in blue). The bottom right quadrant shows the Boyer-Lindquist coordinates and their derivative with respect to the proper time (s) of the observer.

In the video, a blue sphere is placed outside the black hole at some distance, a purple sphere is placed in negative space (i.e., beyond the singularity cut), and the outer and inner horizons are various shades of red and green in the same color scheme as in the Penrose diagram (lighter shades are white hole horizons, darker shades are black hole horizons). All spheres are checkered in an identical way, with twenty-four longitudinal stripes and twelve latitudinal (or polar) stripes, consistent with the black hole's axis. (The longitudinal stripes on the horizons rotate with the black hole.) The ring singularity itself is not visible as such, but appears as the edge rim of the purple region.

*Video and Text Credits:
David Madore

#space #blackhole #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

XMM-Newton catches giant black hole’s X-ray oscillations

The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton has detected rapidly fluctuating X-rays coming from the very edge of a supermassive black hole in the heart of a nearby galaxy. The results paint a fascinating picture that defies how we thought matter falls into such black holes, and points to a potential source of gravitational waves that ESA’s future mission, LISA, could see.

XMM-Newton is showing us that black holes devour matter in more complex ways than astronomers first thought. Black holes are predictions of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. They are gravitational monsters that imprison any piece of matter or energy that crosses their ‘surface’, a region of spacetime known as the event horizon.

During its final descent into the black hole, a process known as accretion, the doomed matter forms a disc around the black hole. The gas in the accretion disc heats up and gives off mostly ultraviolet (UV) light.

The UV rays interact with a cloud of electrically charged gas, or plasma, that surrounds the black hole and accretion disc. This cloud is known as the corona and the interactions give the UV rays energy, boosting them up to X-rays, which XMM-Newton can capture.

XMM-Newton has been observing the supermassive black hole 1ES 1927+654 since 2011. Back then, everything was pretty normal. But in 2018, things changed.

1ES 1927+654 suffered a large outburst that appeared to disrupt its surroundings because the X-ray corona disappeared. Gradually, the corona returned, and by early 2021 normality appeared to have been restored.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/XMM-Newton/XMM-Newton_catches_giant_black_hole_s_X-ray_oscillations

>> there is more >>
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/XMM-Newton/From_boring_to_bursting_a_giant_black_hole_awakens

Credits:
Discovery of extreme Quasi-Periodic Eruptions in a newly accreting massive black hole by L. Hernandez-García et al. is published today in Nature Astronomy. DOI 10.1038/s41550-025-02523-9

#space #blackhole #astroart #astrophotography #photography
#astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

Black Hole Tidal Disruption Event

When a star wanders too close to a black hole, the intense gravity will stretch the star out until it becomes a long river of hot gas, as shown in this animation. The gas is then whipped around the black hole and is gradually pulled into orbit, forming a bright disk.

https://nustar.caltech.edu/

* Credit: Science Communication Lab/DESY

#space #blackhole #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

General_relativity

General relativity, also known as the general theory of relativity, and as Einstein's theory of gravity, is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1915 and is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. General relativity generalizes special relativity and refines Newton's law of universal gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or four-dimensional spacetime. In particular, the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever is present, including matter and radiation. The relation is specified by the Einstein field equations, a system of second-order partial differential equations.

Newton's law of universal gravitation, which describes classical gravity, can be seen as a prediction of general relativity for the almost flat spacetime geometry around stationary mass distributions. Some predictions of general relativity, however, are beyond Newton's law of universal gravitation in classical physics. These predictions concern the passage of time, the geometry of space, the motion of bodies in free fall, and the propagation of light, and include gravitational time dilation, gravitational lensing, the gravitational redshift of light, the Shapiro time delay and singularities/black holes. So far, all tests of general relativity have been shown to be in agreement with the theory. The time-dependent solutions of general relativity enable us to talk about the history of the universe and have provided the modern framework for cosmology, thus leading to the discovery of the Big Bang and cosmic microwave background radiation. ..
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_relativity

* relatively related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerr_metric
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_process
https://physicsopenlab.org/2017/09/07/spectral-lines-broadening/

* Credits: Wikimedia Commons

#space #blackhole #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

The Doubly Warped World of Binary Black Holes
* Scientific Visualization Credit: NASA, GSFC, Jeremy Schnittman & Brian P. Powell; Text: Francis J. Reddy
https://sedvme.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci/bio/francis.j.reddy
https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci/bio/jeremy.d.schnittman
https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci/bio/brian.p.powell
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/
https://www.nasa.gov/

Explanation:
If one black hole looks strange, what about two? Light rays from accretion disks around a pair of orbiting supermassive black holes make their way through the warped space-time produced by extreme gravity in this detailed computer visualization. The simulated accretion disks have been given different false color schemes, red for the disk surrounding a 200-million-solar-mass black hole, and blue for the disk surrounding a 100-million-solar-mass black hole. For these masses, though, both accretion disks would actually emit most of their light in the ultraviolet. The video allows us to see both sides of each black hole at the same time. Red and blue light originating from both black holes can be seen in the innermost ring of light, called the photon sphere, near their event horizons. In the past decade, gravitational waves from black hole collisions have actually been detected, although the coalescence of supermassive black holes remains undiscovered.
https://www.nasa.gov/universe/new-nasa-visualization-probes-the-light-bending-dance-of-binary-black-holes/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap200825.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accretion_disk
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190411.html
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14132/
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993AmJPh..61..619N/abstract
https://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_sphere
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap201104.html

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250506.html

#space #blackhole #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

In this visualization, a binary system containing two supermassive black holes and their accretion disks circle each other, revealing the dramatic distortions produced by their gravity. The different colors of the accretion disks make it easier to track where light from each black hole turns up.

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman and Brian P. Powell

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14132/

Black Hole Accretion Disk Visualization

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC)
Scott Wiessinger (USRA)
Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)
Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)

This new visualization of a black hole illustrates how its gravity distorts our view, warping its surroundings as if seen in a carnival mirror. The visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole where infalling matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole’s extreme gravity skews light emitted by different regions of the disk, producing the misshapen appearance.

Bright knots constantly form and dissipate in the disk as magnetic fields wind and twist through the churning gas. Nearest the black hole, the gas orbits at close to the speed of light, while the outer portions spin a bit more slowly. This difference stretches and shears the bright knots, producing light and dark lanes in the disk.

Viewed from the side, the disk looks brighter on the left than it does on the right. Glowing gas on the left side of the disk moves toward us so fast that the effects of Einstein’s relativity give it a boost in brightness; the opposite happens on the right side, where gas moving away us becomes slightly dimmer. This asymmetry disappears when we see the disk exactly face on because, from that perspective, none of the material is moving along our line of sight.

Closest to the black hole, the gravitational light-bending becomes so excessive that we can see the underside of the disk as a bright ring of light seemingly outlining the black hole. This so-called “photon ring” is composed of multiple rings, which grow progressively fainter and thinner, from light that has circled the black hole two, three, or even more times before escaping to reach our eyes. ...

>> https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13326

#space #blackhole #astrophotography #astrophysics #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA

The black hole’s extreme gravitational field redirects and distorts light coming from different parts of the disk, but exactly what we see depends on our viewing angle. The greatest distortion occurs when viewing the system nearly edgewise.

As our viewpoint rotates around the black hole, we see different parts of the fast-moving gas in the accretion disk moving directly toward us. Due to a phenomenon called "relativistic Doppler beaming," gas in the disk that's moving toward us makes that side of the disk appear brighter, the opposite side darker. This effect disappears when we're directly above or below the disk because, from that angle, none of the gas is moving directly toward us.

When our viewpoint passes beneath the disk, it looks like the gas is moving in the opposite direction. This is no different that viewing a clock from behind, which would make it look like the hands are moving counter-clockwise.

CORRECTION: In earlier versions of the 360-degree movies on this page, these important effects were not apparent. This was due to a minor mistake in orienting the camera relative to the disk. The fact that it was not initially discovered by the NASA scientist who made the movie reflects just how bizarre and counter-intuitive black holes can be!

Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Jeremy Schnittman (NASA/GSFC)
Scott Wiessinger (USRA)
Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)
Francis Reddy (University of Maryland College Park)

>>https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/13326#section_credits

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

IXPE Explores a Black Hole Jet
Illustration Credit: NASA, Pablo Garcia
https://www.nasa.gov/

Explanation:
How do black holes create X-rays? Answering this long-standing question was significantly advanced recently with data taken by NASA’s IXPE satellite. X-rays cannot exit a black hole, but they can be created in the energetic environment nearby, in particular by a jet of particles moving outward. By observing X-ray light arriving from near the supermassive black hole at the center of galaxy BL Lac, called a blazar, it was discovered that these X-rays lacked significant polarization, which is expected when created more by energetic electrons than protons. In the featured artistic illustration, a powerful jet is depicted emanating from an orange-colored accretion disk circling the black hole. Understanding highly energetic processes across the universe helps humanity to understand similar processes that occur on or near our Earth.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/ixpe/nasas-ixpe-reveals-x-ray-generating-particles-in-black-hole-jets/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap031128.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap240507.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250504.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(waves)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BL_Lacertae

https://home.cern/science/physics
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250501832A/abstract
https://science.nasa.gov/ems/11_xrays/
https://pwg.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/whelect.html
https://home.cern/news/news/physics/proton-century
https://chandra.si.edu/art/xray/

https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/aurora/en/

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250509.html

#space #blackhole #astroart #astronomy #physics #photography #science #nature #NASA

Animation: Spiral Disk around a Black Hole
Illustrated Animation Credit: ESA, NASA, Hubble, M. Kornmesser
https://esahubble.org/projects/anniversary/production_team/
https://www.spacetelescope.org/
https://www.esa.int/
https://www.nasa.gov/

Explanation:
What would it look like to orbit a black hole? Many black holes are surrounded by swirling pools of gas known as accretion disks. These disks can be extremely hot, and much of the orbiting gas will eventually fall through the black hole's event horizon -- where it will never be seen again. The featured animation is an artist's rendering of the curious disk spiraling around the supermassive black hole at the center of spiral galaxy NGC 3147. Gas at the inner edge of this disk is so close to the black hole that it moves unusually fast -- at 10 percent of the speed of light. Gas this fast shows relativistic beaming, making the side of the disk heading toward us appear significantly brighter than the side moving away. The animation is based on images of NGC 3147 made recently with the Hubble Space Telescope.

!>> https://ascl.net/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190820.html

#space #blackhole #astronomy #astrophysics #science #NASA

X-RAYS AND ENERGY

X-rays have much higher energy and much shorter wavelengths than ultraviolet light, and scientists usually refer to x-rays in terms of their energy rather than their wavelength. This is partially because x-rays have very small wavelengths, between 0.03 and 3 nanometers, so small that some x-rays are no bigger than a single atom of many elements.a series of 12 x-ray images showing the various level of activity on the Sun.

Our Sun's radiation peaks in the visual range, but the Sun's corona is much hotter and radiates mostly x-rays. To study the corona, scientists use data collected by x-ray detectors on satellites in orbit around the Earth. Japan's Hinode spacecraft produced these x-ray images of the Sun that allow scientists to see and record the energy flows within the corona.

TEMPERATURE AND COMPOSITION

The physical temperature of an object determines the wavelength of the radiation it emits. The hotter the object, the shorter the wavelength of peak emission. X-rays come from objects that are millions of degrees Celsius—such as pulsars, galactic supernovae remnants, and the accretion disk of black holes.

From space, x-ray telescopes collect photons from a given region of the sky. The photons are directed onto the detector where they are absorbed, and the energy, time, and direction of individual photons are recorded. Such measurements can provide clues about the composition, temperature, and density of distant celestial environments. Due to the high energy and penetrating nature of x-rays, x-rays would not be reflected if they hit the mirror head on (much the same way that bullets slam into a wall). X-ray telescopes focus x-rays onto a detector using grazing incidence mirrors (just as bullets ricochet when they hit a wall at a grazing angle).

NASA's Mars Exploration Rover, Spirit, used x-rays to detect the spectral signatures of zinc and nickel in Martian rocks. >>https://science.nasa.gov/ems/11_xrays/
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2025arXiv250501832A/abstract

#space #xrays #science #NASA

NASA’s Hubble Spots Runaway Black Hole Devouring a Star 600 Million Light-Years From Earth
By Ryan Whalen·May 9, 2025

A traveling black hole stalking the cosmos for stellar prey recently revealed itself to NASA telescopes in a tidal disruption event , shredding and swallowing a star in a radioactive burst.
With its brilliant flash, the TDE AT2024tvd lit up several observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the NRAO Very Large Array. The TDE event took place 600 million light-years from Earth, allowing astronomers a new glimpse at black hole physics to be published in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Initially, as the marauding black hole moved through the universe, it was detectable only through gravitational lensing—an effect caused by the black hole’s gravity distorting visible light in a way astronomers could observe.
Eventually, as the black hole encounters a star, its immense gravity pulls the stellar object inward. That intense gravitational force overwhelms the star, spaghettifying it, with some of the remnants forming a bright accretion disc around the black hole’s edge and a stream of electromagnetic radiation pouring out. Shocks and outflows from the accretion disc generate extreme temperatures, producing ultraviolet and visible light emissions.
Out of Center

Black holes are typically found at the centers of their galaxies, but this roaming void in space was the first observed offset from its galaxy, out of the roughly 100 tidal disruption events (TDEs) on record. Intriguingly, the host galaxy already contains a supermassive black hole at its center. The distance between the TDE and the galaxy’s central black hole was only a tenth of the distance from Earth to the Milky Way’s black hole—about 2,600 light-years.
The central black hole in the TDE’s galaxy is larger than the wandering one, and ..

https://thedebrief.org/nasas-hubble-spots-runaway-black-hole-devouring-a-star-600-million-light-years-from-earth/

#space #blackhole #astrophotography #photography #science #nature #NASA

New NASA Black Hole Visualization Takes Viewers Beyond the Brink

...

As the camera approaches the black hole, reaching speeds ever closer to that of light itself, the glow from the accretion disk and background stars becomes amplified in much the same way as the sound of an oncoming racecar rises in pitch. Their light appears brighter and whiter when looking into the direction of travel.

The movies begin with the camera located nearly 400 million miles (640 million kilometers) away, with the black hole quickly filling the view. Along the way, the black hole’s disk, photon rings, and the night sky become increasingly distorted — and even form multiple images as their light traverses the increasingly warped space-time.

In real time, the camera takes about 3 hours to fall to the event horizon, executing almost two complete 30-minute orbits along the way. But to anyone observing from afar, it would never quite get there. As space-time becomes ever more distorted closer to the horizon, the image of the camera would slow and then seem to freeze just shy of it. This is why astronomers originally referred to black holes as “frozen stars.”

At the event horizon, even space-time itself flows inward at the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit. Once inside it, both the camera and the space-time in which it's moving rush toward the black hole's center — a one-dimensional point called a singularity, where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.

“Once the camera crosses the horizon, its destruction by spaghettification is just 12.8 seconds away,” Schnittman said. From there, it’s only 79,500 miles (128,000 kilometers) to the singularity. This final leg of the voyage is over in the blink of an eye.

https://science.nasa.gov/universe/black-holes/supermassive-black-holes/new-nasa-black-hole-visualization-takes-viewers-beyond-the-brink/

#space #blackhole #science #nature #NASA

Nearby black holes and their stellar companions form an astrophysical rogues’ gallery

Stars born with more than about 20 times the Sun’s mass end their lives as black holes. As the name implies, black holes don’t glow on their own because nothing can escape them, not even light. Until 2015, when astronomers first detected merging black holes through the space-time ripples called gravitational waves, the main way to find these ebony enigmas was to search for them in binary systems where they interacted with companion stars. And the best way to do that was to look in X-rays.

This visualization shows 22 X-ray binaries in our Milky Way galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud, that host confirmed stellar-mass black holes. The systems appear at the same physical scale, demonstrating their diversity. Their orbital motion is sped up by nearly 22,000 times, and the viewing angles replicate how we see them from Earth.

When paired with a star, a black hole can collect matter in two ways. In many cases, a stream of gas can flow directly from the star to the black hole. In others, such as the first confirmed black hole system, Cygnus X-1, the star produces a dense outflow called a stellar wind, some of which the black hole’s intense gravity gathers up. So far, there’s no clear consensus on which mode is used by GRS 1915, the big system at the center of the visualization.

As it arrives at the black hole, the gas goes into orbit and forms a broad, flattened structure called an accretion disk. GRS 1915’s accretion disk may extend more than 50 million miles (80 million kilometers), greater than the distance separating Mercury from the Sun. Gas in the disk heats up as it slowly spirals inward, glowing in visible, ultraviolet, and finally X-ray light.

By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

Media contacts:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

#space #blackholes #astronomy #NASA #science

New insights into black hole scattering and gravitational waves unveiled

Their research provides a high-precision prediction of black hole scattering.

This research, led by Professor Jan Plefka at Humboldt University of Berlin and Queen Mary University London’s Dr Gustav Mogull, formerly at Humboldt Universität and the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), and conducted in collaboration with an international team of physicists, provides unprecedented precision in calculations crucial to understanding gravitational waves.

Using cutting-edge techniques inspired by quantum field theory, the team calculated the fifth post-Minkowskian (5PM) order for observables such as scattering angles, radiated energy, and recoil. A groundbreaking aspect of the work is the appearance of Calabi-Yau three-fold periods – geometric structures rooted in string theory and algebraic geometry – within the radiative energy and recoil. These structures, once considered purely mathematical, now find relevance in describing real-world astrophysical phenomena.

With gravitational wave observatories like LIGO entering a new phase of sensitivity and next-generation detectors such as LISA on the horizon, this research meets the increasing demand for theoretical models of extraordinary accuracy.

Dr Mogull explained the significance:

While the physical process of two black holes interacting and scattering via gravity ...
>>> read more:

https://www.qmul.ac.uk/media/news/2025/science-and-engineering/se/new-insights-into-black-hole-scattering-and-gravitational-waves-unveiled.html

#space #blackholes #astronomy #NASA #science #physics #quantummechanics

July 10, 2024

NASA’s Hubble Finds Strong Evidence for Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in Omega Centauri

Most known black holes are either extremely massive, like the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies, or relatively lightweight, with a mass of under 100 times that of the Sun. Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are scarce, however, and are considered rare "missing links" in black hole evolution.

Now, an international team of astronomers has used more than 500 images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope — spanning two decades of observations — to search for evidence of an intermediate-mass black hole by following the motion of seven fast-moving stars in the innermost region of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri.

These stars provide new compelling evidence for the presence of the gravitational pull from an intermediate-mass black hole tugging on them. Only a few other IMBH candidates have been found to date.

Omega Centauri consists of roughly 10 million stars that are gravitationally bound. The cluster is about 10 times as massive as other big globular clusters — almost as massive as a small galaxy.

Among the many questions scientists want to answer: Are there any IMBHs, and if so, how common are they? Does a supermassive black hole grow from an IMBH? How do IMBHs themselves form? Are dense star clusters their favored home?

The astronomers have now created an enormous catalog for the motions of these stars, measuring the velocities for 1.4 million stars gleaned from the Hubble images of the cluster. Most of these observations were intended to calibrate Hubble's instruments rather than for scientific use, but they turned out to be an ideal database for the team's research efforts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03722
https://zenodo.org/records/11104046
[...]

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-finds-strong-evidence-for-intermediate-mass-black-hole-in-omega-centauri/

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

[...]

"We discovered seven stars that should not be there," explained Maximilian Häberle of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who led this investigation. "They are moving so fast that they would escape the cluster and never come back. The most likely explanation is that a very massive object is gravitationally pulling on these stars and keeping them close to the center. The only object that can be so massive is a black hole, with a mass at least 8,200 times that of our Sun."

Several studies have suggested the presence of an IMBH in Omega Centauri. However, other studies proposed the mass could be contributed by a central cluster of stellar-mass black holes, and had suggested the lack of fast-moving stars above the necessary escape velocity made an IMBH less likely in comparison.

"This discovery is the most direct evidence so far of an IMBH in Omega Centauri," added team lead Nadine Neumayer of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, who initiated the study, together with Anil Seth from the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
[...]
If confirmed, at a distance of 17,700 light-years the candidate black hole resides closer to Earth than the 4.3-million-solar-mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way, located 26,000 light-years away.

Omega Centauri is visible from Earth with the naked eye and is one of the favorite celestial objects for stargazers living in the southern hemisphere. Located just above the plane of the Milky Way, the cluster appears almost as large as the full Moon when seen from a dark rural area. It was first listed in Ptolemy’s catalog nearly 2,000 years ago as a single star. Edmond Halley reported it as a nebula in 1677. In the 1830s the English astronomer John Herschel was the first to recognize it as a globular cluster.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/nasas-hubble-finds-strong-evidence-for-intermediate-mass-black-hole-in-omega-centauri/

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

"Om Nano Paeme Hum ;) "

2023 June 29

A Message from the Gravitational Universe
* Illustration Credit: NANOGrav Physics Frontier Center;
https://nanograv.org/
* Text: Natalia Lewandowska (SUNY Oswego)
https://ww1.oswego.edu/physics/

Explanation:
Monitoring 68 pulsars with very large radio telescopes, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has uncovered evidence for the gravitational wave (GW) background by carefully measuring slight shifts in the arrival times of pulses. These shifts are correlated between different pulsars in a way that indicates that they are caused by GWs. This GW background is likely due to hundreds of thousands or even millions of supermassive black hole binaries. Teams in Europe, Asia and Australia have also independently reported their results today. Previously, the LIGO and Virgo detectors have detected higher-frequency GWs from the merging of individual pairs of massive orbiting objects, such as stellar-mass black holes. The featured illustration highlights this spacetime-shaking result by depicting two orbiting supermassive black holes and several of the pulsars that would appear to have slight timing shifts. The imprint these GWs make on spacetime itself is illustrated
by a distorted grid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_telescope
https://nanograv.org/science/overview
https://nanograv.org/science/topics/low-frequency-gravitational-waves
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave_background
https://nanograv.org/news/15yrRelease
https://www.seti.org/news/nanogravs-15-year-journey-reveals-a-cosmic-hum/
https://astrobites.org/2018/01/29/hunting-for-gravitational-waves-from-spinning-neutron-stars/

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230629.html

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

2018 December 3

Spiraling Supermassive Black Holes
* Video Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
https://www.nasa.gov/
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard
* Music: In the Hall of the Mountain King by Edvard Grieg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hall_of_the_Mountain_King
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edvard_Grieg

Explanation:
Do black holes glow when they collide? When merging, co-orbiting black holes are sure to emit a burst of unusual gravitational radiation, but will they emit light, well before that, if they are surrounded by gas? To help find out, astrophysicists created a sophisticated computer simulation. The simulation and featured resulting video accurately depicts two spiraling supermassive black holes, including the effects of Einstein's general relativity on the surrounding gas and light. The video first shows the system from the top, and later from the side where unusual gravitational lens distortions are more prominent. Numerical results indicate that gravitational and magnetic forces should energize the gas to emit high-energy light from the ultraviolet to the X-ray. The emission of such light may enable humanity to detect and study supermassive black hole pairs well before they spiral together.

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap181203.html

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

2021 December 7

Ninety Gravitational Wave Spectrograms and Counting
* Image Credit: NSF, LIGO, VIRGO, KAGRA, Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt U.
https://www.nsf.gov/
https://www.ligo.org/about.php
http://public.virgo-gw.eu/the-virgo-collaboration/
https://gwcenter.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/organization
https://physics.gatech.edu/
https://as.vanderbilt.edu/physics/
* Graphic : Sudarshan Ghonge & Karan Jani
https://humansofligo.blogspot.com/2019/05/sudarshan-ghonge.html
https://www.karanjani.com/

Explanation:
Every time two massive black holes collide, a loud chirping sound is broadcast out into the universe in gravitational waves. Humanity has only had the technology to hear these unusual chirps for the past seven years, but since then we have heard about 90 -- during the first three observing runs. Featured above are the spectrograms -- plots of gravitational-wave frequency versus time -- of these 90 as detected by the giant detectors of LIGO (in the USA), VIRGO (in Europe), and KAGRA (in Japan). The more energy received on Earth from a collision, the brighter it appears on the graphic. Among many science firsts, these gravitational-radiation chirps are giving humanity an unprecedented inventory of black holes and neutron stars, and a new way to measure the expansion rate of our universe. A fourth gravitational wave observing run with increased sensitivity is currently planned to begin in 2022 December.

https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/gravitational-waves/en/

https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-G2102338/public
https://ligo.org/science-summaries/O3bAstroDist/

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211207.html

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

The Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

Gravitational waves sent out from a pair of colliding black holes have been converted to sound waves, as heard in this animation. On September 14, 2015, LIGO observed gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes, each about 30 times the mass of our sun. The incredibly powerful event, which released 50 times more energy than all the stars in the observable universe, lasted only fractions of a second.

In the first two runs of the animation, the sound-wave frequencies exactly match the frequencies of the gravitational waves. The second two runs of the animation play the sounds again at higher frequencies that better fit the human hearing range. The animation ends by playing the original frequencies again twice.

As the black holes spiral closer and closer in together, the frequency of the gravitational waves increases. Scientists call these sounds "chirps," because some events that generate gravitation waves would sound like a bird's chirp.

Audio Credit:
Caltech/MIT/LIGO Lab
ligo.caltech.edu

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

2017 March 27

Black Hole Accreting with Jet
* Illustration Credit: NASA, Swift, Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State U.)
https://www.nasa.gov/
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/main
http://universe.sonoma.edu/~aurore/about.html
http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/index.shtml

Explanation:
What happens when a black hole devours a star? Many details remain unknown, but recent observations are providing new clues. In 2014, a powerful explosion was recorded by the ground-based robotic telescopes of the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) project, and followed up by instruments including NASA's Earth-orbiting Swift satellite. Computer modeling of these emissions fit a star being ripped apart by a distant supermassive black hole. The results of such a collision are portrayed in the featured artistic illustration. The black hole itself is a depicted as a tiny black dot in the center. As matter falls toward the hole, it collides with other matter and heats up. Surrounding the black hole is an accretion disk of hot matter that used to be the star, with a jet emanating from the black hole's spin axis.

https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/asassn/index.shtml

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap170327.html

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA

2025 September 24

GW250114: Rotating Black Holes Collide
* Illustration Credit: Aurore Simonnet (SSU/EdEon), LVK, URI; LIGO Collaboration
https://auroresimonnet.com/about-me/
https://phys-astro.sonoma.edu/
https://edeon.sonoma.edu/
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligo-scientific-collaboration

Explanation:
It was the strongest gravitational wave signal yet measured -- what did it show? GW250114 was detected by both arms of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Washington and Louisiana USA earlier this year. Analysis showed that the event was created when two black holes, each of mass around 33 times the mass of the Sun, coalesced into one larger black hole with a mass of around 63 solar masses. Even though the event happened about a billion light years away, the signal was so strong that the spin of all black holes, as well as initial ringing of the final black hole, was deduced with exceptional accuracy. Furthermore, it was confirmed better than before, as previously predicted, that the total event horizon area of the combined black hole was greater than those of the merging black holes. Featured, an artist's illustration depicts an imaginative and conceptual view from near one of the black holes before collision.
https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/
https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/first-overtones-heard-ringing-black-hole
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/black-holes/anatomy/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190414.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html

https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/black-holes/en/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191001.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_thermodynamics#Second_law_2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GW250114

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250924.html

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA #education

2025 December 3

Visualization: Near a Black Hole and Disk
* Illustration Credit: NASA's GSFC, J. Schnittman & B. Powell
https://www.nasa.gov/
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/
https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci/bio/jeremy.d.schnittman
https://science.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci/bio/brian.p.powell
* Text: Francis Reddy (U. Maryland, NASA's GSFC)
https://sedvme.gsfc.nasa.gov/sci/bio/francis.j.reddy
https://www.astro.umd.edu/
https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/

Explanation:
What would it look like to plunge into a monster black hole? This image from a supercomputer visualization shows the entire sky as seen from a simulated camera plunging toward a 4-million-solar-mass black hole, similar to the one at the center of our galaxy. The camera lies about 16 million kilometers from the black hole’s event horizon and is moving inward at 62% the speed of light. Thanks to gravity’s funhouse effects, the starry band of the Milky Way appears both as a compact loop at the top of this view and as a secondary image stretching across the bottom. Move the cursor over the image for additional explanations. Visualizations like this allow astronomers to explore black holes in ways not otherwise possible.
https://youtu.be/chhcwk4-esM
https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14585/
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/fap/ap220513.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/Numbers/Math/Mathematical_Thinking/how_fast_is_the_speed.htm
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/fap/ap101207.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/fap/ap250702.html
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/the-milky-way-galaxy/https://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/rjn_bht.html
https://science.nasa.gov/universe/black-holes/

https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap251203.html

#space #blackhole #astrophysics #astrophotography #photography #astronomy #science #nature #NASA #ESA #education #apod