APOD: 2025 May 9 Б IXPE Explores a Black Hole Jet
9.05.2025

How do black holes create X-rays? Answering this long-standing question was significantly advanced recently with data taken by NASAБs IXPE satellite. X-rays cannot exit a black hole, but they can be created in the energetic environment nearby, in particular by a jet of particles moving outward.

UHZ1: Distant Galaxy and Black Hole
10.11.2023

Dominated by dark matter, massive cluster of galaxies Abell 2744 is known to some as Pandora's Cluster. It lies 3.5 billion light-years away toward the constellation Sculptor. Using the galaxy cluster's enormous...

EHT Resolves Central Jet from Black Hole in Cen A
4.08.2021

How do supermassive black holes create powerful jets? To help find out, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) imaged the center of the nearby active galaxy Centaurus A. The cascade of featured inset images shows...

APOD: 2025 November 2 Б A Horseshoe Einstein Ring from Hubble
2.11.2025

What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured here, the gravity of a massive elliptical galaxy (luminous red galaxy: LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy.

A Black Hole in M87's Center?
5.03.1996

The center of nearby giant galaxy M87 is a dense and violent place. In this 1994 photograph by the Hubble Space Telescope, a disk of hot gas was found to be orbiting at the center of this massive elliptical galaxy. The disk is evident on the lower left of the above photograph.

Animation: Black Hole Star Shredder
27.04.2021

What happens if a star gets too close to a black hole? The black hole can rip it apart -- but how? It's not the high gravitational attraction itself that's the problem -- it's the difference in gravitational pull across the star that creates the destruction.

Black Hole Accreting with Jet
27.03.2017

What happens when a black hole devours a star? Many details remain unknown, but recent observations are providing new clues. In 2014, a powerful explosion was recorded by the ground-based robotic telescopes of the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) project, and followed up by instruments including NASA's Earth-orbiting Swift satellite.

Two Black Holes Dancing in 3C 75
22.10.2017

What's happening at the center of active galaxy 3C 75? The two bright sources at the center of this composite x-ray (blue)/ radio (pink) image are co-orbiting supermassive black holes powering the giant radio source 3C 75.

The Galaxy, the Jet, and a Famous Black Hole
15.04.2021

Bright elliptical galaxy Messier 87 (M87) is home to the supermassive black hole captured by planet Earth's Event Horizon Telescope in the first ever image of a black hole. Giant of the Virgo...

At the Heart of Orion
1.01.2015

Near the center of this sharp cosmic portrait, at the heart of the Orion Nebula, are four hot, massive stars known as the Trapezium. Tightly gathered within a region about 1.5 light-years in radius, they dominate the core of the dense Orion Nebula Star Cluster.