A new space mission, due to launch this month, is going to shed light on some of the most extreme astrophysical processes in nature - including pulsars, remnants of supernovae, and supermassive black holes.

At the cores of many galaxies, supermassive black holes expel powerful jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. Just how they perform this feat has long been one of the mysteries of astrophysics.

IMAGINE being able to peek inside a black hole and even perform experiments there. It may not be as far-fetched as it sounds, thanks to a team which claims to have simulated a black hole’s event horizon in the lab.

Neutron stars and black holes aren’t all they’ve been thought to be.
In fact, neutron stars can be considerably more massive than previously believed, and it is more difficult to form black holes, according to new research developed by using the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

It’s well known that black holes can slow time to a crawl and tidally stretch large objects into spaghetti-like strands. But according to new theoretical research from two NASA astrophysicists, the wrenching gravity just outside the outer boundary of a black hole can produce yet another bizarre effect: light echoes.

If the latest simulation of what happens when black holes merge is correct, there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing several thousand times the mass of the sun, roaming around the Milky Way galaxy.

Breakthrough astrophysics research may have established the hitherto mysterious source of exceptionally high-energy cosmic ray emissions, according to recently published research that culminates a project developed by a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

Scientists of the Pierre Auger Collaboration, which includes New York University Physics Professor Glennys R. Farrar, have concluded that active galactic nuclei are the most likely candidate for the source of the highest-energy cosmic rays that hit Earth.

An international team, including astronomers from Tel Aviv University, has uncovered the most massive stellar black hole found to date in a binary system.

Using two NASA satellites, astronomers have discovered the heftiest known black hole to orbit a star. The new black hole, with a mass 24 to 33 times that of our Sun, is more massive than scientists expected for a black hole that formed from a dying star.

Discovery of the largest example of a “small” black hole — one formed from the collapse of a single massive star at the end of its lifetime — has led scientists to revaluate of how black holes come into being, according to a report in Nature.

Color images documenting the past 10 billion years of galactic evolution were distributed online this week as part of the first public release of data from a massive project to map a distant region of the universe that combines the efforts of nearly 100 researchers from around the world, including the University of Pittsburgh.