[DrCaleb]

That galaxy next door? It's home to a monster black hole

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A new study of super-fast-moving stars suggests that they were accelerated by a monster black hole that's been lurking unseen in the galaxy next door.

This appears to be the closest supermassive black hole outside our Milky Way galaxy, according to a report that's appearing in The Astrophysical Journal.

While scientists think that most galaxies have a giant black hole at their centers, until now no one knew that one of these beasts resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that's right near the Milky Way.

"Now that there is strong evidence that it should be there, you can rest assured that we are very excitedly following up," says Jesse Han of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, who led the study. "The search is on and we're using all the telescopes we can to look for it."

[DrCaleb]

Can NASA remain nonpartisan when basic spaceflight truths are shredded?

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Kate Tice, an engineer from SpaceX on the webcast, noted that touchdown was imminent. "We're going to stand by for splashdown located in the Gulf of America," she said.

Ah, yes. The Gulf of America.

This is why we can't have nice things.

[DrCaleb]

As preps continue, it’s looking more likely that NASA will fly the Artemis II mission

[DrCaleb]

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars

[DrCaleb]

Recent image of Neptune taken by the KECK telescopes.

[DrCaleb]

Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought

They almost didn't make it to the station, and they weren't sure they could make it back to Earth safely.

[DrCaleb]

Yes, there really is a black hole on the loose in Sagittarius

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For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole — one with no star orbiting it.

It’s “the only one so far,” says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object’s mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu’s team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal.