Astronomers may have caught a supermassive black hole in the act of forming inside a uniquely shaped galaxy. Astronomers working with the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island have identified a rare and unusual galaxy they’ve dubbed the “Infinity” galaxy. This intriguing object appears

Astronomers have discovered potentially the most massive black hole ever detected. The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

It exists in one of the most massive galaxies ever observed—the Cosmic Horseshoe—which is so big it distorts spacetime and warps the passing light of a background galaxy into a giant horseshoe-shaped Einstein ring.

Such is the enormousness of the ultramassive black hole’s size, it equates to 36 billion solar masses, according to a new paper published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

An international team of astronomers has performed multiwavelength observations of a gamma-ray binary system known as HESS J0632+057. Results of the observational campaign, presented July 31 on the pre-print server arXiv, shed more light on the nature of this binary.

Gamma-ray binaries consist of a massive OB-type star in orbit with a compact object like a neutron star or black hole. Some of them emit a significant amount of radiation in very high-energy (TeV) and are therefore known as TeV gamma-ray binaries (TGBs).

TGBs exhibit diverse high-energy phenomena driven by interactions between the two components. Given that these sources are extremely rare, astronomers are especially interested in exploring them in detail, which could help us better understand their mysterious nature.

Astronomers have discovered a remarkably clumpy rotating galaxy that existed just 900 million years after the Big Bang, shedding new light on how galaxies grew and evolved in the early universe. Nicknamed the “Cosmic Grapes,” the galaxy appears to be composed of at least 15 massive star-forming clumps—far more than current theoretical models predict could exist within a single rotating disk at this early time.

The discovery, published in Nature Astronomy, was made possible by an extraordinary combination of observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), all focused on a single galaxy that happened to be perfectly magnified by a foreground galaxy cluster through gravitational lensing. In total, more than 100 hours of telescope time were dedicated to this single system, making it one of the most intensively studied galaxies from the early universe.

Although the galaxy had appeared as a smooth, single disk-like object in previous Hubble images, the powerful resolution of ALMA and JWST, enhanced by gravitational lensing, revealed a dramatically different picture: a rotating galaxy teeming with massive clumps, resembling a cluster of grapes. The finding marks the first time astronomers have linked small-scale internal structures and large-scale rotation in a typical galaxy at cosmic dawn, reaching spatial resolutions down to just 10 parsecs (about 30 light-years).