It takes something as stupendous as the merger between two black holes to generate detectable gravitational waves. Here’s how such incredible cosmic objects form.
It is the physics discovery of the century – even bigger than the Higgs Boson. Here’s how it happened and what it means, by a key member of one of the lead teams
The information paradox is one of the great mysteries in our understanding of black holes. But has the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking found the solution?
Two white dwarfs found orbiting each other at the centre of a planetary nebula are now known to have enough mass that they will eventually trigger a special kind of supernova, according to research published…
A supermassive black hole has been found in an ultracompact dwarf galaxy – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive black hole. This finding, published today in Nature, suggests that supermassive…
Katherine Mack, astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne, answered questions posed by the public on Reddit. The Conversation has curated the highlights. Dark Matter How do you explain dark matter…
A black hole with extremely powerful jets has been found in the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83) by a team of Australian and American researchers, as we report in the journal Science today. Black holes are…
Over the past few days, the media has cried out the recent proclamation from Stephen Hawking that black holes, a mystery of both science and science fiction, do not exist. Such statements send social media…
While we tend to think of black holes as giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, it’s not all one-way travel. As gas falls in towards a black hole, it spirals gradually inwards like water going down a plug hole…
Galaxies may look pretty and delicate, with their swirls of stars of many colours - but don’t be fooled. At the heart of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, including in our own Milky Way. Black…
Matter escaping from the clutches of mysterious black holes may be responsible for forming stars, according to new research that explores how galaxies are formed. Much has been learnt about black holes…
Astronomers have measured the spin of a black hole buried in the heart of a galaxy located 56 million light years away, and discovered it was spinning quickly – about as quickly as it could go. That was…
Scientists in the US have successfully used a new NASA telescope to help improve our understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve. Using data taken by the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array…
Australian researchers have redefined the relationship between galaxies and their black holes, showing that a widely-accepted method for calculating the mass of smaller black holes was wrong. The breakthrough…