Tracking down black holes at the center of dwarf galaxies has proven difficult. In part that is because they have a tendency to “wander” and are not located at the galaxy’s center. There are plenty of galaxies that might contain such a black hole, but so far we’ve had insufficient data to confirm their existence. A new paper from Megan Sturm of Montana State University and her colleagues analyzed additional data from Chandra and Hubble on a set of 12 potential Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) galaxy candidates. They were only able to confirm three, which highlights the difficulty in isolating these massive wanderers.
Space News & Blog Articles
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Lasers target the Tarantula Nebula with 'artificial stars' | Space photo of the day for Nov. 19, 2025
The Very Large Telescope's interferometer targeted four lasers toward the Tarantula Nebula to create an artificial star.
Webb spots greedy supermassive black hole in early Universe
Researchers using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have confirmed an actively growing supermassive black hole within a galaxy just 570 million years after the Big Bang. Part of a class of small, very distant galaxies that have mystified astronomers, CANUCS-LRD-z8.6 represents a vital piece of this puzzle and challenges existing theories about the formation of galaxies and black holes in the early Universe. The discovery connects early black holes with the luminous quasars we observe today.
Scientists just discovered a new crater on the moon — they call it a 'freckle'
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera has identified a never-before-seen crater on the moon's surface.
SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket streaks into Florida's night sky carrying Starlink satellites to orbit (video)
SpaceX launched another batch of its Starlink internet satellites in a nighttime liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Tuesday (Nov. 18).
What's Driving Dark Energy?
To be fair, all scientific models are in some sense wrong. They’re all approximations of reality. They’re all mathematical models that we use to describe and understand our observations and measurements. And like I said, the LCDM model has, over the course of almost a quarter century, proven to be enormously resilient, flexible, and powerful when describing broad swaths of nature.
The Euclid space telescope observed 1.2 million galaxies in just 1 year. Here's what we've learned
The data is starting to reveal how galaxies and their black holes evolve.
The Andromeda Galaxy Quenches Its Satellite Galaxies Long Before They Fall In
Astronomers know that mergers play a huge role in galaxy growth. Right now, the Milky Way is slowly consuming the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The evidence is a stream of gas called the Magellanic Stream that's about 600,000 light-years long. The Milky Way (MW) is stripping this gas from the clouds, which don't have enough mass to retain it. They're losing the gravitational tug-of-war with the much more massive MW.
Walk through the asteroid strike that killed the dinosaurs with American Museum of Natural History's new 'Impact' exhibit
"It sounds like science fiction or the stuff of Hollywood movies."
Ryan Gosling and 'Rocky' team up to save the galaxy in new 'Project Hail Mary' trailer (video)
"His planet's dying, too. We're here for the same reason."
The James Webb Space Telescope may have finally found the 1st stars in the universe
"We really needed the sensitivity of JWST. We also needed the 100 times magnification from gravitational lensing from a galaxy cluster between us and LAP1-B."
Supernovas
A supernova is a powerful and luminous stellar explosion. This transient astronomical event occurs during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star or when a white dwarf is triggered into runaway nuclear fusion. The explosion marks the ultimate demise of the star and briefly outshines an entire galaxy, radiating as much energy as the Sun is expected to emit over its entire lifespan.
Do the cores of dead stars exist forever?
Regular stars collapse and die once they run out of fuel for their nuclear reactions, but the white dwarfs just sit there, hanging out, for eternity.
SpaceX resumes early evening launches after FAA restrictions lifted
A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral, reflected in the waters of the Kennedy Space Center Turnbasin. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.
SpaceX launched of a batch of Starlink satellites on Tuesday, its first early-evening flight since the FAA lifted restrictions on commercial launches prompted by the government shutdown.
Huge red giant star has newfound companion — and it may be a bad neighbor
"Throwing a close companion into the mix could possibly wreak further havoc on the already complicated processes surrounding these stars."
Will Europe's flagship space science missions survive NASA's budget cuts?
NASA budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump will cause a significant funding shortfall to Europe's space science missions. But the European Space Agency hopes it can save them.
Comet K1/ATLAS Crumbles, Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Delights
Watch an Oort Cloud comet disintegrate before your eyes. Meanwhile, interstellar intruder 3I/ATLAS is brighter than expected.
Galaxy quest: A galaxy-themed trivia quiz
Dive into the dazzling depths of the universe with this galaxy-themed trivia quiz that spans cosmic facts, mysterious phenomena, and the wild wonders of deep space.
The best UCS Lego Star Wars sets ranked
These are the Lego sets you're looking for — The UCS Lego Star Wars sets, the best of the best, ranked in a definitive round-up.
Euclid space telescope sees gorgeous cosmic cloud | Space photo of the day for Nov. 18, 2025
This image shows Euclid's capability to explore both our cosmic neighborhood and the deep universe beyond.
How Three Runaway Stars Solved A Galactic Mystery
All motion is relative. That simple fact makes tracking the motion of distant objects outside our galaxy particularly challenging. For example, there has been a debate among astronomers for decades about the path that one of our nearest neighbors, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), took over the last few billion years. A new paper from Scott Lucchini and Jiwon Jesse Han from the Harvard Center for Astrophysics grapples with that question by using a unique technique - the paths of hypervelocity stars.
