King of Supernovas Sheds Light on Early Stars

15-mile-wide black hole is smallest ever found

(NEWSER) - Astronomers have spotted the smallest black hole ever discovered, Reuters reports. It is just 15 miles across—the size of a city—but still has a pull strong enough to "stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti," said a NASA researcher. The relative pipsqueak weighs about as much as four suns, while black holes often weigh billions of times more. More»

(NEWSER) - A monstrous black hole near the center of a distant galaxy is sucking up stars, gas and dust, and spitting out baby stars, NASA scientists have discovered. The black hole is 100 million times the mass of the sun, reports the Telegraph. It lies at the center of a galaxy 50 million light years away known as NGC-1097, and has been photographed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in California. More»

Astronomers puzzled by all-time heaviest 'small' black hole

(NEWSER) - A newly discovered stellar-mass black hole shatters the weight record for holes formed from dying stars—and defies explanation by current theories. Faced with its mysterious heft, astrophysicists can only conclude that stellar-mass black holes "can be much larger than we had realized," Space.com reports. More»

Historic images reveal high-def surface, flares

(NEWSER) - NASA has released astounding new photos and videos of the sun for the first time revealing high definition, close-up views of the solar surface and exploding flares. The images were captured by the space telescope of the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and are providing historic new insight into sun mechanics, notes the Melbourne Herald Sun . More»

Gamma ray burst took 13 billion years to reach Earth

(NEWSER) - Astronomers have detected a cosmic object more distant than any ever seen: a gamma ray burst about 13 billion light-years from Earth. The massive, luminous burst occurred about 600 million years after the Big Bang—that is, when the universe was 4% of its current age—and only lasted for about 12 seconds. Scientists say the ancient burst allows an unprecedented view into the earliest days of the universe. More»