Astronomers have come across a monstrously large black hole with a gargantuan appetite. Each passing day, the insatiable void known as J2157 consumes gas and dust equivalent in mass to the sun, making it the fastest-growing black hole in the universe. The sheer scale of J2157 is almost unfathomable, but we can try pinning some numbers on it nevertheless.

An unusually bright star in a nearby galaxy has gone missing, in a mystery of cosmic proportions. An object inside the Kinman dwarf galaxy has disappeared from view, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This massive and exceptionally bright blue star was hypothesized to exist based on astronomical observations made between 2001 and 2011, but as of 2019, it is no longer detectable.

We now know just how massive the fastest-growing black hole in the universe actually is, as well as how much it eats, thanks to new research led by the Australian National University (ANU). It is 34 billion times the mass of our Sun and gorges on nearly the equivalent of one Sun every day, according to Dr. Christopher Onken and his colleagues.

In spite of their dark reputations, two black holes may have set off a cosmic light show. Subtle gravitational rumbles from a collision of two black holes may have been accompanied by a flare of light about a month later, physicists report June 25 in Physical Review Letters. It’s a surprising conclusion given black holes’ propensity to swallow up light and matter. “The normal expectation has been they just merge and all you would detect is gravitational waves,” says astrophysicist Matthew Graham of Caltech.

A black hole about 390 million light-years away has caused the biggest eruption ever seen in the universe. The supermassive black hole sits at the center of a galaxy located in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster. Its eruption was about five times greater than the last record-holder.

At long last, all of the universe’s ordinary matter seems to be present and accounted for. Astronomers have taken a new census of matter in the universe by examining how bright flashes of radio waves from other galaxies, called fast radio bursts, are distorted by particles on their way to Earth. This analysis shows that about half of the universe’s ordinary matter, which has eluded detection for decades, is lurking in intergalactic space, researchers report online May 27 in Nature.

The discrepancy between how fast the universe seems to be expanding and how fast we expect it to expand is one of cosmology’s most stubbornly persistent anomalies. Cosmologists base their expectation of the expansion rate — a rate known as the Hubble constant — on measurements of radiation emitted shortly after the Big Bang. This radiation reveals the precise ingredients of the early universe. Cosmologists plug the ingredients into their model of cosmic evolution and run the model forward to see how quickly space should be expanding today.

The first sign that Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity was correct has made a repeat appearance, this time near a supermassive black hole. In 1915, Einstein realized that his newly formulated general theory of relativity explained a weird quirk in the orbit of Mercury. Now, that same effect has been found in a star’s orbit of the enormous black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, researchers with the GRAVITY collaboration report April 16 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

A newly discovered black hole is closer than any other to Earth, scientists say. It is so nearby that the stars that swirl around it can be see with the naked eye, they write in a new study.And the object could be just the "tip of the iceberg" with many other similar black holes being hidden and waiting to be found, the astronomers say.

3.5 billion light years from Earth — a significant chunk of the way across the visible Universe — lies a monster. It's called OJ287, and it's an active galaxy, one with a tremendous amount of energy blasting out of its nucleus. It's classified as a blazar, one of the most luminous objects in the Universe, with energy pouring out of it across the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves all the way up to high-energy gamma rays.

The oldest disk-shaped galaxy ever spotted formed just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, a new study finds. That’s much earlier than astronomers thought that this type of galaxy could form. Previous observations show that disk-shaped galaxies — including sprawling, spiral systems like the Milky Way — didn’t show up in large numbers until between 3 billion and 4 billion years after the Big Bang, which occurred about 13.8 billion years ago.

One of the brightest stars in the sky makes up Orion's shoulder and also looks to be on the verge of going supernova sometime between today and 100,000 years from today.

Even a galaxy teeming with star-hopping alien civilizations should still harbor isolated, unvisited worlds—and Earth might be among them

Just as astronomers thought they were making sense of fast radio bursts (FRBs) — the mysterious repeating signals originating deep in space — the universe threw us a curveball.

When searching for dark matter, astronomers must go on a sort of "ghost hunt." That's because dark matter is an invisible substance that cannot be seen directly. Yet it makes up the bulk of the universe's mass and forms the scaffolding upon which galaxies are built. Dark matter is the gravitational "glue" that holds galaxies as well as galaxy clusters together. Astronomers can detect its presence indirectly by measuring how its gravity affects stars and galaxies.

Every season has its characteristic star constellations in the night sky. Orion—one of the most recognizable—is distinctly visible on crisp, clear winter nights in the northern hemisphere. The constellation is easy to spot even in light-polluted cities, with its bright stars representing the shape of a person.

Material falling into a black hole casts X-rays out into space—and now astronomers have used the echoes of this radiation to map the dynamic behavior and surroundings of a black hole itself. Most black holes are too small on the sky for us to determine their immediate environment, but we can still explore these mysterious objects by watching how matter behaves as it nears, and falls into, them.

It’s been about a year since the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released the first image of a black hole. That groundbreaking snapshot featured the supermassive black hole at the center of M87, a massive elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years from Earth. Now, the EHT Collaboration has released a new image, which shows a jet shooting from the nearly 1-billion-solar-mass black hole 3C 279, located about 5 billion light-years away. The results associated with the image were published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The scientists behind the first picture of a black hole are squeezing everything they can from the data they’ve got. A year after presenting a portrait of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 (SN: 4/10/19), the Event Horizon Telescope team faces a two-year data drought, thanks to technical snafus, security snags and a global pandemic.

The discrepancy between how fast the universe seems to be expanding and how fast we expect it to expand is one of cosmology’s most stubbornly persistent anomalies. Cosmologists base their expectation of the expansion rate—a rate known as the Hubble constant—on measurements of radiation emitted shortly after the Big Bang. This radiation reveals the precise ingredients of the early universe. Cosmologists plug the ingredients into their model of cosmic evolution and run the model forward to see how quickly space should be expanding today.