Scientists try to unravel the birth, growth and power of black holes, some of the most forceful yet difficult-to-detect objects in our universe.

It was only last year that astronomers were finally able to unveil the first pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But you couldn’t actually see the black hole itself, not directly. That’s because it is so dense that its gravitational pull prevents even light from escaping.

But the image of Sagittarius A, as our galaxy’s black hole is known, revealed a glowing halo of gas around the object—an object that we now know has a million times more mass than our sun.

Astronomers in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a black hole in the heart of a dwarf galaxy that, rather than absorbing stars, generates them.

Some images to help orient you in the midst of Whitehead’s categoreal forest.

Astronomers spotted the wake left by the supermassive black hole as it barrels across the disk after being kicked out during a galactic merger.

These hypothetical stars are the densest objects in the universe that can exist without becoming full-fledged black holes.

The cosmic web is the term used to refer to the clusters, filaments, and voids that make up the large-scale structure of the Universe. In Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) cosmology, this web is formed from the anisotropic gravitational collapse of matter from primordial overdensities.

We’ve been able to map the Cosmic Web through observation over the past few decades, which opens up the possibility of finding answers to some of astronomy’s most pressing issues. An area of particular interest is how magnetic fields behave on a cosmic scale and their role in galactic and cosmic structure formation.

ICRAR scientists discover tantalizing evidence of magnetic fields in the universe’s most significant cosmic structures.

Using data from ESA’s Gaia astrometry mission, astronomers have identified the closest known black hole.

A black hole is a place in space where the gravitational field is so strong that not even light can escape it. Astronomers classify black holes into three categories by size: miniature, stellar, and supermassive black holes. Miniature black holes could have a mass smaller than our Sun and supermassive black holes could have a mass equivalent to billions of our Sun.

Throughout billions of years, galaxies expand and evolve through the appropriately titled “galactic immigration” events, which involve the formation of new stars and mergers with other galaxies. Scientists examine the movements of individual stars within a galaxy and its wide halo of stars and dark matter to learn more about the histories of these immigration episodes. But until now, such cosmic archaeology has only been possible in our galaxy, the Milky Way.

An international team of researchers has uncovered striking new evidence of a large galactic immigration event in the Andromeda Galaxy. Star motions exhibit complex patterns indicating migratory history similar to the Milky Way. The new findings were attained using Nicholas U.’s Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which the DOE operates.

A team of astronomers studied the motions of nearly 7,500 stars in the inner halo of the Andromeda Galaxy, also known as Messier 31 (M31). They found patterns in their positions and motions that indicated how these stars originated as a part of an earlier galaxy that joined M31 about 2 billion years ago. Although such patterns have long been anticipated by theory, they have never been observed in a galaxy with such clarity.