New simulations show that interactions with a magnetic field can work to decrease the distance between still forming binary protostars. These results can help explain the characteristics of the binary star systems observed in the Milky Way. The results can also be extrapolated to binary black holes, giving insights into how supermassive black holes evolve.

The work is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Stars form from clouds of interstellar gas that collapse into dense regions known as molecular cloud cores. Multiple stars form close together simultaneously, and in some cases two stars will become gravitationally bound to each other, forming a binary star system.

The most distant, nearly invisible dormant black hole has been detected and “weighed” by an international team of astronomers that includes researchers from UCL. The study, published in Science, identified a dormant black hole at the heart of a galaxy known as MRG-M0138 located over 10 billion light years away. It is the most distant dormant black hole yet detected, 15 times farther away than the previous record.

The black hole’s mass is about 6 billion times that of the sun, and is being observed at a time when the universe was only about 3 billion years old, about a quarter of its current age, offering unprecedented details into black holes in the early universe.

To find this, the team used data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to track the motion of stars orbiting around the otherwise invisible black hole to measure its mass. Though the technique—known as stellar dynamics —has been used to measure dormant black holes in galaxies much closer to Earth, this is the first time it has been used to weigh one located such a great (cosmological) distance away.

A team led by York University researchers has discovered the fastest wind near a supermassive black hole ever found at ultraviolet wavelengths, driven by the disk of matter (quasar) surrounding the black hole.

“This quasar has a black hole of 1.7 billion times the mass of the sun. That’s typical. What’s not typical is that it has gas moving towards us at 30% of the speed of light,” says York Professor Patrick Hall of the Faculty of Science.

The finding is published in a paper in The Astrophysical Journal.

The violation of the third law of black hole mechanics in higher dimensional vacuum gravity is numerically demonstrated.

An international team of astronomers have employed one of the Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs) at the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) to observe a distant blazar known as OP 313. Results of the observational campaign, published May 26 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the behavior and nature of this object.

Blazars are extremely compact quasi-stellar objects (quasars) associated with supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the centers of active, giant elliptical galaxies. They are the most luminous and extreme subclass of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). The characteristic features of blazars are highly collimated relativistic jets oriented very close to our line of sight.

Based on their optical emission properties, astronomers generally divide blazars into two classes: flat-spectrum radio quasars (FSRQs) that feature prominent and broad optical emission lines, and BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs), which do not.

NASA’s Fermi telescope may have finally uncovered the magnetic powerhouse behind the universe’s brightest supernovae.