Topic
Million- to billion-solar-mass black holes at galactic centers, observable indirectly through accretion-powered emission.
Oxford-led astronomers using DESI found 546 bulgeless galaxies with feeding black holes sit on the same black hole-to-stellar mass relation as bulged ones. A bulge usually signals past mergers, so the result favours growth fed by bars and spiral arms, if that proxy holds.
Reality
A Syracuse-led team says a star that arrives already rotating fast cannot be spun up much further, which lets each weaker pass finally look weaker. Four of about ten known repeaters fade.
Reality
Redshifts of double quasars can be wrong about depth by as much as 10 million light-years, because the black hole's own outflows spoil the velocity. Huanqing Chen's team tested reading the separation from lit-up gas.
Reality
Webb picks up little red dots in nearly every image it takes, but two of them look like nothing in the ground-based archives, and the teams that found them say the pair hides a newborn supermassive black hole inside a bright hydrogen envelope.
Reality
Three stacked passes over the whole sky produced the largest public X-ray source catalog to date. Most of what it found lies outside the Milky Way, and the consortium says X-ray detection is only the first step.
Reality