Black Holes and Exploding Stars

What would happen if you crossed paths with a black hole? Nothing good, that's for sure. Here are two popular theories about how exactly a black hole would kill you.

Supercomputer models of merging black holes reveal properties that are crucial to understanding future detections of gravitational waves. This movie follows two orbiting black holes and their accretion disk during their final three orbits and ultimate merger.

Armed with powerful supercomputers, scientists simulated the jets that roar out of neutron stars at the moment of collision. From NASA Astrophysics.

Astronomers using NASA's Swift satellite recently detected a rise in high-energy X-rays from a source toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The outburst, produced by a rare X-ray nova, came from a previously unknown stellar-mass black hole.

Scientists have further narrowed the search for a hypothetical particle that could be dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up 80 percent of all the mass in the universe. This video from NASA Astrophysics presents the new results, compiled from two years' worth of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

Eta Carinae is a binary system containing the most luminous and massive star within 10,000 light-years. A long-term study produces the most comprehensive picture of this strange system. From NASA.

Find out what astronomers have been learning when they look deep into the core of giant galaxies. In nearly every one, they are turning up supermassive black holes that are tearing space to shreds, blasting away at their environments, and raging against the relentless force of gravity that created them in the first place.

A team of astronomers has discovered a new object that is heading almost straight towards the black hole. The object is not a star, but a cloud of gas traveling at more than 8 million kilometers per hour.

The Crab Nebula courtesy of NASA. Created by a supernova seen nearly a thousand years ago, it's one of the sky's most famous "star wrecks." Now, high-energy sensors are probing its mysterious rumblings.

The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope picked up a high-intensity explosion on the surface of a white dwarf star. The finding stunned astronomers because it overturns a long-standing notion that such novae explosions can't pack this much power.

Measurements of unprecedented detail returned by Japan's Hitomi satellite have allowed scientists to track the motion of X-ray-emitting gas at the heart of the Perseus cluster of galaxies for the first time. Located about 240 million light-years away and named for its host constellation, the Perseus galaxy cluster contains a vast amount of extremely hot gas.