If you got too close to a black hole, it would suck you in and you’d never be able to escape, even if you were travelling at the speed of light.
This point of no return is called the event horizon.
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Articles on Supermassive black holes
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Astronomers say they have “seen what we thought was unseeable” in releasing the first image of a supermassive black hole. So how did we get to this historic observation?
Scientists turned Earth into one giant telescope to capture the uncapturable.
A black hole is an object with such a strong gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape from it.
A number of surrounding galaxies are slowly being devoured by the most luminous object in the sky.
Astronomers have suspected them for ages –now a team as finally spotted a ‘fountain’ in a galaxy far, far away.
Merging supermassive black holes would emit gravitational waves, allowing scientists to detect them.
Astronomers traced a single star as it passed close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and detected the telltale signature of Einstein’s gravity in action.
A giant detector at the South Pole has observed a neutrino from a black hole in a distant galaxy for the first time.
The pull created by a black hole is so strong that if you get too close to one – even if you are travelling away from it at the fastest speed it is possible to go – you will never be able escape.
A team of astronomers captured the moment when a wayward star was pulled into the mouth of a supermassive black hole.
There could be thousands of black holes at the heart of the Milky Way.
Jets from supermassive black holes behave in mysterious ways. Now scientists have now worked out what’s really going on.
Black holes may come in many sizes, but there’s still a gap in the middle. The hunt is on to solve the mystery of where are the intermediate size black holes.
It’s difficult to get jets - powerful, lightning fast particles - to give up their secrets. The new Square Kilometre Array radio telescope could hold the key to solving jets’ mysteries.
Astronomers have detected clumpy gas clouds on the verge of being swallowed by a supermassive black hole, rushing towards it at over 537,000 miles an hour.
A new study suggests that mysterious high energy cosmic rays might originate from the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
It’s taken centuries for our understanding of gravity to evolve to where it is today, culminating in the discovery of gravitational waves, as predicted by Albert Einstein a century ago.
CC BY-ND45.4 MB (download)
Tanya Hill speaks with Meg Urry about distant galaxies and the supermassive black holes that lurk in their centres.
Top contributors
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Astrophysics, The University of Queensland
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JASPER Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Arizona
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Post-doctoral researcher in Astrophysics, University of the Western Cape
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Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria and Honorary Fellow at University of Melbourne, Museums Victoria Research Institute
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Professor in High Energy Astrophyics, University of Adelaide
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Senior research scientist, CSIRO
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Professor of Astronomy, Swinburne University of Technology
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Radio Astronomer, Curtin University
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Reader (Physics and Astronomy), University of Sussex
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Leicester
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Southampton
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Lecturer of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University
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Professor of Physics & Astronomy, Yale University
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Professor of Astrophysics, The University of Queensland
