Black Hole

Black Hole

quasar-galaxy hybrid
Found by Hubble before JWST's launch, GNz7q looked like a mix of a galaxy and a quasar. Was it actually our first known "little red dot"?
A digitally rendered black hole with a dark center and a glowing, distorted ring of light surrounding it.
23 min
"Could black holes be the key to a quantum theory of gravity, a deeper theory of how reality, of how space and time works? Well, I think so."
From here on Earth, looking farther away in space means looking farther back in time. So what are distant Earth-watchers seeing right now?
black hole
All of the matter that we measure today originated in the hot Big Bang. But even before that, and far into the future, it'll never be empty.
LIGO Livingston
10 years ago, LIGO first began directly detecting gravitational waves. Now better than ever, it's revealing previously unreachable features.
Book cover of "Facing Infinity: Black Holes and Our Place on Earth" by Jonas Enander, exploring the mysteries priest black holes hold, next to the text "an excerpt from" on a split blue and beige background.
In this excerpt from "Facing Infinity," Jonas Enander examines how John Michell conceived of "dark stars," or massive bodies with enough gravity to trap light, all the way back in 1783.
An artist's impression of a cluster of stars.
With several seemingly incompatible observations, cosmology faces many puzzles. Could early, supermassive stars be the unified solution?
A chart titled "Masses in the Stellar Graveyard" shows the black holes and neutron stars detected by LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA, plotted on a logarithmic scale in solar masses, highlighting how LIGO triples black hole haul with each new discovery.
10 years ago, LIGO saw its first gravitational wave. After 218 detections, our view of black holes has changed forever. Can this era endure?
A man in a suit sits on a chair against a yellow background with abstract blue and green wave patterns behind him.
1 min
“I like to say that physics is hard because physics is easy, by which I mean we actually think about physics as students.”
An image of an ancient black hole
At the center of Hubble's famous "cosmic horseshoe," a very heavy supermassive black hole has been robustly measured. How is it possible?
Amplifying the energy within a laser, over and over, won't get you an infinite amount of energy. There's a fundamental limit due to physics.
Two supermassive black holes on an inevitable death spiral push the limits of Einstein's relativity. New observations reveal even more.
every square degree
When the Hubble Space Telescope first launched in 1990, there was so much we didn't know. Here's how far we've come.
Green abstract image with floating, glowing funnel-shaped objects and spherical wireframe shapes evokes a black hole universe, all set against a misty green background with ethereal light streaks.
Once you cross a black hole's event horizon, there's no going back. But inside, could creating a singularity give birth to a new Universe?
gravitational wave effects on spacetime
With over 300 high-significance gravitational wave detections, we now have a huge unsolved puzzle. Will we invest in finding the solution?
Two glowing spheres, one red and one green, face each other in space with a wavy line of light—like a particle physics collision—connecting them against a speckled dark background reminiscent of the last collider’s discoveries.
Will we build a successor collider to the LHC? Someday, we'll reach the true limit of what experiments can probe. But that won't be the end.