Researchers have discovered what is either the heaviest known neutron star, or the lightest black hole. When the most massive stars die, they collapse under their own gravity and leave behind black holes; when stars that are a bit less massive die, they explode in supernovas and leave behind dense, dead remnants of stars called neutron stars...
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June 14, 2020,
Astronomy/Space
Like most galaxies, the Milky Way hosts a supermassive black hole at its center. Called Sagittarius A*, the object has captured astronomers’ curiosity for decades. And now there is an effort to image it directly.
Catching a good photo of the celestial beast will require a better understanding of what’s going on around it, which has proved challenging due to the vastly different scales involved...
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A team of researchers have published new calculations that predict a striking and intricate substructure within black hole images from extreme gravitational light bending. Last April, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) sparked international excitement when it unveiled the first image of a black hole...
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December 2, 2019,
Astronomy/Space
About 15,000 light years away, in a distant spiral arm of the Milky Way, there is a black hole about 70 times as heavy as the Sun. The black hole seems too big to be the product of a single star collapsing, which poses questions for our theories of how black holes form.
Our team, led by Professor Jifeng Liu at the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has dubbed the mysterious object LB-1.
Astronomers estimate that our galaxy alone contains about 100 million black holes, created when massive stars have collapsed over the past 13 billion years.
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