A supermassive black hole is a black hole weighing between roughly a hundred thousand and tens of billions of times the mass of the Sun. Nearly every large galaxy appears to host one at its center, including the Milky Way, whose Sagittarius A* holds about four million solar masses. When they pull in gas they blaze as quasars and active galactic nuclei, briefly outshining every star in their host galaxy combined. How they grew so large so early remains unsolved, a problem sharpened by JWST's discovery of unexpectedly massive black holes in the infant universe.
Astrophysics · Black Holes · Tidal Disruption
Wander too close to a supermassive black hole and gravity becomes a weapon. The star is stretched into a stream of gas, half of it swallowed in a flar...
Astrophysics · Black Holes · Galactic Center
Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun, sitting 27,000 light-years from Earth. For three decades it was an ...
Cosmology · Dark Matter · Black Holes
Supermassive black holes appeared too early and grew too fast for standard physics to comfortably explain. A 2026 study proposes an unlikely culprit: ...