Astronomers Detect Black Hole 36 Billion Times the Sun’s Mass, Among Largest Ever Found

Astronomers have measured the weight of a huge black hole — 36 billion times the mass of our sun, or six times the size of our entire solar system — in an old and dead galaxy near Earth. This cosmic monster resides in one of the largest galaxies of the Cosmic Horseshoe, holds it top 10 largest black holes ever, and possibly No. Instead, it was spotted through the enormous gravity that warps the light and stars near it, not from X-ray emissions. It provides a very rare glimpse into the early stages of black hole formation and its impact on the speed at which massive galaxies grow.

Einstein Horseshoe Reveals Hidden 36-Billion-Solar-Mass Black Hole in Fossil Galaxy System

According to a statement from the University of Portsmouth, by measuring the gravitational lensing of light into an “Einstein horseshoe” caused by a background galaxy and also from the motions of stars orbiting the black hole (which are moving nearly 400 km/s), they estimated the mass of this black hole in detail; this direct approach can locate other missing ultramassive central supermassive black holes throughout the universe – including dormant, non-accreting ones.

The upshot: galaxy clusters eventually turn into lifeless fossil groups once their galaxy mergers cease (a prerequisite for quenching star formation), and what remains of gas or stars flung during cluster formation are sucked into the mammoth, central galaxies in the middle of these hubs. He idea: The neighbouring partner galaxies to these far-off universes are dead, and just this mammoth remains since it ate all the seeds from its forerunner pal.

But what we do know is that, in the distant past, galaxies built up through mergers over time. And when we see galaxies tens of thousands to millions/millions of years after they formed, we would always expect the event to simply be too old for a typical TeV-level event and would, in any case, no longer be active.

The research, published August 7 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, could refine understanding of how black holes and galaxies co-evolve and offer a glimpse into the Milky Way's far-future fate when it eventually merges with Andromeda.

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Hubble Uncovers Multi-Age Stars in Ancient Cluster, Reshaping Galaxy Origins

Astronomers call ancient star clusters like NGC 1786 “time capsules” for their galaxy, preserving some of its oldest stars. A new image from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope offers an unprecedented close-up of this dense cluster 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Hubble's data show that NGC 1786 contains stars of different ages – a surprising find, since such clusters were once thought to hold a single stellar generation. This multi-age discovery is reshaping our view of how galaxies built their first stars, and suggests more complex early history. Mixed-Age Stars in a Galactic Time Capsule According to the official source, this Hubble image shows the globular cluster NGC 1786, a ball of densely packed stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth. Astronomers captured this picture as part of a program comparing ancient clusters in nearby dwarf galaxies (like the LMC) with clusters in our own Milky Way. The surprising discovery is th...

CSIRO Uses Quantum AI to Revolutionize Semiconductor Design

Researchers at Australia's CSIRO have achieved a world-first demonstration of quantum machine learning in semiconductor fabrication. The quantum-enhanced model outperformed conventional AI methods and could reshape how microchips are designed. The team focused on modeling a crucial—but hard to predict—property called “Ohmic contact” resistance, which measures how easily current flows where metal meets a semiconductor. They analysed 159 experimental samples from advanced gallium nitride (GaN) transistors (known for high power/high-frequency performance). By combining a quantum processing layer with a final classical regression step, the model extracted subtle patterns that traditional approaches had missed. Tackling a difficult design problem According to the study, the CSIRO researchers first encoded many fabrication variables (like gas mixtures and annealing times) per device and used principal component analysis (PCA) to shrink 37 parameters down to the five most important ones. ...

A Planet with a Death Wish: How HIP 67522 b Is Forcing Its Star to Explode

Scientists have caught a planet with a death wish, which is an alien world, orbiting very near to its star, and so speedy that it is causing the star to go to its death with bursting explosions. HIP 67522 b is the planet, and it is of the same size as Jupiter with a seven-day orbit around its host star. These orbits are disturbing the magnetic field of the star and causing enormous blasting eruptions to blow back the planet and make it wrinkled. This is the first time that a planet is influencing the host star, as the astronomers reported in a study published on July 2, 2025, in the Journal Nature. A Planet with a Death Wish: HIP 67522 b's Fiery Orbit As per the study by NASA, Ekaterina Ilin, the first author of the study and an astrophysicist at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, said that the planet was observed to trigger the energetic flares. It has been predicted by the scientists that the waves are setting off explosions that are going to happen. Magnetic Chaos: P...

Kartavya Kant Tiwari

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