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 artist's interpretation of a black hole's accretion disk An artist's interpretation of a black hole's accretion disk For the first time ever, scientists have measured the exact size of the disk of ...

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 ...

Scientists smashed plasma jets together to create artificial accretion disks that could help reveal how black holes grow. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

Researchers conducted innovative simulations of spinning black holes grounded in general relativity, which clarified that the ultraluminous accretion disk (i.e., gaseous spiral surrounding a black ...

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 ...

Gravity causes matter to clump together, forming everything from stars to planets. Accretion disks form when material swirls around a central object due to conserved angular momentum. Magnetic fields ...

A research team from the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with other researchers, has developed a new method to estimate how stellar-mass compact objects ...

An international scientific team has revealed for the first time the magnetic field transport processes in the accretion flow of a black hole and the formation of a "MAD"—a magnetically arrested ...

Black holes are regions of austere darkness, gobbling up everything — even light — that strays too close. But the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is not so dark. Astronomers often ...

Black holes are better known for their ability to bend space and time than their gold-forging abilities. Yet that may change: new research suggests that black holes may be able to create super heavy ...