Artistic illustration of the thick dust torus thought to surround supermassive black holes and their accretion disks. [ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC)] Credit: Durham University

A new study reveals that supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, known as quasars, can sometimes be obscured by dense clouds of gas and dust in their host galaxies.

Artistic illustration of the thick dust torus thought to surround supermassive black holes and their accretion disks. [ESA / V. Beckmann (NASA-GSFC)] Credit: Durham University

This challenges the prevailing idea that quasars are only obscured by donut-shaped rings of dust in the close vicinity of the black hole.

Quasars are extremely bright objects powered by black holes gorging on surrounding material...

The connection between exercise and inflammation has captivated the imagination of researchers ever since an early 20th-century study showed a spike of white cells in the blood of Boston marathon runners following the race.

Now, a new Harvard Medical School study published in Science Immunology may offer a molecular explanation behind this century-old observation.

The study, in mice, suggests that the beneficial effects of exercise may be driven, at least partly, by ...

How likely would an electric vehicle battery self-combust and explode? The chances of that happening are actually pretty slim: Some analysts say that gasoline vehicles are nearly 30 times more likely to catch fire than electric vehicles...

A system of seven sweltering planets has been revealed by continued study of data from NASA’s retired Kepler space telescope: Each one is bathed in more radiant heat from their host star per area than any planet in our solar system. Also unlike any of our immediate neighbors, all seven planets in this system, named Kepler-385, are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune.

It is one of only a few planetary systems known to contain more than six verified planets or planet candidates...