In December 2020, astronomers spotted an unusual burst of light in a galaxy roughly 848 million light-years away—a region with a supermassive black hole at the center that had been largely quiet until ...

Black holes exert a tremendous influence on their surroundings, meaning that when they spin, they literally drag the very fabric of space and time around with them. That means nothing can sit still ...

An actively feeding black hole surrounds itself with a disk of hot gas and dust that flickers like a campfire. Astronomers have now found that monitoring changes in those flickers can reveal something ...

An illustration of a black hole with an accretion disk, accompanied by diagrams showcasing the team's research. Astronomers have observed the outer edge of a disk of matter surrounding a feeding ...

NASA has released an intriguing and educational visualization of a black hole surrounded by a distorted disk of shining matter. The animation reveals how the powerful gravitational influence of a ...

The new observations help explain how accretion disks around black holes take shape. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. Lurking in ...

As the most massive objects in existence, black holes usually have accretion disks, rings of gas and other materials that reach blazing hot temperatures, sometimes even emitting powerful, luminous ...

Disks of hot gas drawn onto a central star or black hole are the best energy-producing machines in the Universe. So how do these accretion disks work? The answer, it seems, is blowing in their winds.