Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.

And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disk before their one-way trip into the hole, and these disks can shine more brightly than entire galaxies.

Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The brightness of the glowing disks can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why.

Cosmology playlist.

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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.