The material in the jet is plasma, which is composed of atoms that have been heated so much that their electrons are torn away, creating a mixture of positively charged atoms (or ions) and those stripped-away electrons.
Active black holes, such as those at a center of a quasar, tend to emit large streams of ionized matter, called jets. A black hole's jets are believed to be caused by material traveling along its accretion disc to its polar region, where the matter is blown out at high speeds.
Astronomers have observed a black hole burping up stellar remains years after it shredded and consumed the star.
Super-massive black holes in the centers of some active galaxies create powerful jets of radiation and particles travelling close to the speed of light. Attracted by strong gravity, matter falls towards the central black hole as it feeds on the surrounding gas and dust.
Black holes are dark, dense regions in space where the pull of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Not even light can get out of these regions. That is why we cannot see black holes—they are invisible to our eyes. Because nothing can get out of black holes, physicists struggle understanding these objects.
Astronomers have discovered evidence for an extraordinarily long jet of particles coming from a supermassive black hole in the early universe, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. If confirmed, it would be the most distant supermassive black hole with a jet detected in X-rays.
Fortunately, this has never happened to anyone — black holes are too far away to pull in any matter from our solar system.
The black hole's gravity flung one of the stars away, which transformed into a runaway hypervelocity star racing at 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) per second out of the galaxy.
We might be the product of another, older universe. Call it our mother universe. The seed this mother universe forged inside a black hole may have had its big bounce 13.8 billion years ago, and even though our universe has been rapidly expanding ever since, we could still be hidden behind a black hole's event horizon.
The most powerful supernova yet recorded (ASSASN-15lh) was 22 trillion times more explosive than a black hole will be in its final moments. It doesn't matter how small or how massive a black hole is, their closing fireworks are exactly the same. The only difference is how long it will take a black hole to explode.
Near a black hole, the slowing of time is extreme. From the viewpoint of an observer outside the black hole, time stops. For example, an object falling into the hole would appear frozen in time at the edge of the hole. Inside a black hole is where the real mystery lies.
Stellar black holes are very cold: they have a temperature of nearly absolute zero – which is zero Kelvin, or −273.15 degrees Celsius. Supermassive black holes are even colder. But a black hole's event horizon is incredibly hot. The gas being pulled rapidly into a black hole can reach millions of degrees.
Cosmologists aren't sure if the universe is infinitely big or just extremely large. To measure the universe, astronomers instead look at its curvature. The geometric curve on large scales of the universe tells us about its overall shape. If the universe is perfectly geometrically flat, then it can be infinite.
The resulting uninhabitable black hole would have such a powerful gravitational pull that not even light could avoid it. So, should you then find yourself at the event horizon — the point at which light and matter can only pass inward, as proposed by the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild — there is no escape.
Black holes have two parts. There is the event horizon, which you can think of as the surface, though it's simply the point where the gravity gets too strong for anything to escape. And then, at the center, is the singularity. That's the word we use to describe a point that is infinitely small and infinitely dense.
Black holes, the gigantic remains of collapsed stars that are massive inescapable singularities of gravity, will eventually evaporate and fade into nothingness, something that Stephen Hawking predicted. But the same fate also awaits literally everything else, a recent study suggests.
Scientists have discovered the only space object – a lone star, that has managed to escape the force of a supermassive black hole. This is unique because the gravitational pull in a black hole is supposed to be so strong that nothing can escape from it, not even light.
While researchers have never found a wormhole in our universe, scientists often see wormholes described in the solutions to important physics equations. Most prominently, the solutions to the equations behind Einstein's theory of space-time and general relativity include wormholes.
In reality, they are purely theoretical. Unlike black holes—also once thought to be purely theoretical—no evidence for an actual wormhole has ever been found, although they are fascinating from an abstract theoretical physics perceptive.
A single Black Hole, even one at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, is just too small to eat an entire galaxy.
In 2003, astronomers took extensive maps of the region around a black hole sitting 250 million light-years away. The gas was so hot that it glowed in X-ray radiation, and the astronomers noticed ripples and waves in the disk. These were pressure – that is, sound – waves.
The nearest known black hole is Gaia BH1, which was discovered in September 2022 by a team led by Kareem El-Badry. Gaia BH1 is 1,560 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus.
Despite their abundance, there is no reason to panic: black holes will not devour Earth nor the Universe. It is incredibly unlikely that Earth would ever fall into a black hole. This is because, at a distance, their gravitational pull is no more compelling than a star of the same mass.
It is possible for two black holes to collide. Once they come so close that they cannot escape each other's gravity, they will merge to become one bigger black hole. Such an event would be extremely violent. Even when simulating this event on powerful computers, we cannot fully understand it.