Black holes are considered cosmic gluttons, from which not even light can escape. That is also why the images of black holes at the center of the galaxy M87 and our Milky Way, published a few years ago by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, broke new ground.

“What you see on these images is not the black hole itself, but rather the hot matter in its immediate vicinity,” explains Prof. Luciano Rezzolla, who, along with his team at Goethe University Frankfurt, played a key role in the findings.

“As long as the matter is still rotating outside the event horizon —before being inevitably pulled in—it can emit final signals of light that we can, in principle, detect.”

The most massive stars in the universe are destined to explode as brilliant supernova before collapsing into black holes. Yet one huge star appears to have never fulfilled its destiny; in a twist of irony, the star wandered too close to a gargantuan black hole, which gobbled it up, shredding the star to bits and pieces.

That is the most likely explanation to come from authors of a new study published in Nature Astronomy describing the most powerful and most distant flare of energy ever recorded from a supermassive black hole.

The cosmic object was first observed in 2018 by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), based at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory, and the Caltech-led Catalina Real-Time Transient Survey. The flare rapidly brightened by a factor of 40 over a period of months, and, at its peak, was 30 times more luminous than any previous black hole flare seen to date. At its brightest, the flare shined with the light of 10 trillion suns.

Alan Guth was known as the “inventor” of the theory of cosmic inflation, which was able to explain some of the lingering questions about cosmological development that the original big-bang model had left open. Guth’s book “The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins” (1997), written for a general audience, discusses the theory.

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have captured the most detailed look yet at how galaxies formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang—and found they were far more chaotic and messy than those we see today.

The team, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, analyzed more than 250 young galaxies that existed when the universe was between 800 million and 1.5 billion years old. By studying the movement of gas within these galaxies, the researchers discovered that most were turbulent, “clumpy” systems that had not yet settled into smooth rotating disks like our own Milky Way.

Their findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest that galaxies gradually became calmer and more ordered as the universe evolved. But in the early universe, star formation and gravitational instabilities stirred up so much turbulence that many galaxies struggled to settle.