Black holes are often considered terrors of the known universe. Supermassive black holes are regions of space where the pull of gravity is so intense that even light doesn't have enough energy to ...

A team of researchers recently observed a distant star that was ripped to shreds by a supermassive black hole. The tidal ...

Astronomers at MIT, Columbia University, and elsewhere have used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer through the dust of nearby galaxies and into the aftermath of a black hole's stellar ...

Back in 2024, a system set up to identify objects that suddenly brighten found something unusual. Unfortunately, the automated system that was supposed to identify it couldn’t figure out what it was ...

Black holes are invisible, yet they are among the brightest things in the universe. If a star wanders too close to a black hole, it gets torn apart in a fireworks show called a tidal disruption event.

What can dormant black holes teach astronomers about tidal disruption events (TDEs), which is the bright flash observed when a black hole consumes a star that passes too close to it? This is what a ...

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) occur when a star ventures too close to a supermassive black hole and is gravitationally torn apart by tidal forces. The resulting stellar debris forms an accretion disc ...

An artist’s impression of a tidal disruption event, in which a star is spaghettified and the remains form an accretion disk around the black hole. Typically, about half the star’s mass is drawn into ...