Explore:
Exoplanets
Worlds beyond our solar system.
Stars
Giant balls of hot gas that burn for millions to billions of years.
Black Holes
Concentrations of matter with gravity so powerful not even light can escape.
Galaxies
Collections of stars, planets, and vast clouds of gas and dust bound together by gravity.
Archival Data From NASA’s NEOWISE Tracks Star Turning Into Black Hole
Around 2.5 million light-years away in the Andromeda galaxy, a dying star named M31-2014-DS1 did something unusual. Rather than exploding, the star blinked out, leaving behind a shroud of hot gas and dust — and something else, which was captured by a NASA telescope.
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NASA's Webb Delivers Sharpest Image of a Black Hole's Surroundings
Thought to be streams of superheated matter that fired outward, new observations suggest that most of the hot, dusty material in The Circinus Galaxy is actually feeding the central black hole.
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NASA’s Black Hole Roundup
This visualization presents 22 X-ray binary systems that host confirmed black holes at the same scale, with their orbits sped up by about 22,000 times.
The view of each system reflects how we see it from Earth. The black holes themselves are shown larger than in reality using spheres scaled to reflect their masses.
Peering into a Galaxy’s Dusty Core to Study an Active Supermassive Black Hole
Centaurus A is a giant of a galaxy, but its appearances in telescope observations can be deceiving. From the core of the misshapen elliptical galaxy, spectacular jets of material have erupted from its active supermassive black hole — known as an active galactic nucleus — sending material into space well beyond the galaxy’s limits.
Since the galaxy is so close to us, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can create two-dimensional maps to see how the gas and stars move in its central region, how they are influenced by the jets from its active galactic nucleus, and ultimately better characterize the mass of its black hole.
