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In a village smithy, the blacksmith pumps the bellows, and sparks fly into the darkness. So too in the galaxy AEON-z5, an active nucleus, like a red-hot forge, hurls metal-enriched material far beyond the stellar disk. The James Webb Space Telescope caught this process just a billion years after the Big Bang, when the universe was still in its infancy.

In active galactic nuclei, supermassive black holes are surrounded by a dense ring of dust that acts like a curtain: it hides everything happening at the center. If a star ventures too close to the black hole, tidal forces tear it apart, and the resulting flare is usually visible in optical and X-ray light.

The night forest is full of fireflies, but before, we only saw those that happened to be in the beam of a flashlight. That was the case with ultraluminous X-ray sources: points in other galaxies that shine in X-rays more brightly than a stellar-mass black hole can steadily emit. Telescopes looked at galaxies chosen for other purposes, missing most of the fireflies.

Galaxy Mrk 590 behaves like a radio receiver that sometimes picks up a signal and sometimes fades into static. Its supermassive black hole has been brightening and dimming for decades, and astronomers caught every such 'switch-on.' In 2017, the receiver came alive again, but the VLA radio telescope heard not the signal they expected.

The night sky is full of rings and bubbles, but in the radio band they look different. In data from the Australian radio telescope ASKAP, a structure has surfaced that resembles two soap bubbles blown from the same straw.

At the center of a galaxy, where a supermassive black hole spins a disk of scorching gas around itself, giant stars sometimes form. They are unlike ordinary stars: the disk continuously feeds them with matter, and a star can grow to hundreds of solar masses, staying bright as long as the gas flow lasts.

The XMM-Newton X-ray telescope stared at galaxy Mrk 1044 for two straight hours. Inside it, a black hole is surrounded by a swirling disk of superheated gas. This gas glows in X-rays, and its light flickers — brighter, then dimmer. For the first half hour, the flickering of soft and hard X-rays was in step.

At the heart of nearly every large galaxy sits a supermassive black hole. Usually it behaves quietly, but sometimes, like a waking volcano, it spits out narrow plasma jets. These jets glow in the radio band, making the galaxy 'radio-loud.' Astronomers have long known this happens, but they couldn't catch the very moment of switching on.

A black hole with a mass of 35,000 Suns drifts through a galaxy's gas like a barge through fog. Its gravity rakes the material ahead of it, leaving a dense trail behind — a wake of gas. Some of that gas gets pulled into the black hole, and it grows.

The cosmic detective story began with a quiet flash in the optical band. AT2019wzc slowly brightened and faded like a smoldering ember. But hidden inside was something more energetic — repeating soft X-ray bursts that astronomers call quasi-periodic eruptions. These eruptions last minutes to hours and repeat every few hours or days.

At the centers of many galaxies lurk giant black holes. They are surrounded by dense clouds of hot plasma that emit a powerful X-ray glow.

A marathon lasting 13 billion years started with different weights. A hundred solar masses — lighter than some gas clouds. A hundred thousand — gravitational dominance, comparable to an elephant among kittens. That's what black hole seeds looked like, ones that by our time should have turned into supermassive giants.

In the deep field of JWST, among thousands of galaxies, astronomers zoomed in on the source JADES-GS 209777 – and saw a cosmic chick. Its "shell" is a thick cocoon of gas and cosmic dust that long hid the growing black hole at its center. But at a redshift of 3,711 (1,8 billion years after the Big Bang), the shell began to crack.

The fastest wind in the Universe travels at 0,58 times the speed of light. It covers the distance from Earth to the Moon in two seconds. This wind is not a jet stream but a broad flow of gas erupting from the center of a galaxy. Not all black holes work the same: some create such hurricanes, while others produce narrow plasma beams.

Assembling the puzzle of the Universe, astronomers are used to every new detail fitting perfectly into the already completed picture. But sometimes there are pieces that seem cut from another jigsaw. Twenty thousand active galactic nuclei, and eleven percent of them the neural network confidently rejects as alien.

For decades astrophysicists painted a neat picture: a galaxy, like a giant carousel, spins in a unified rhythm, and the supermassive black hole at its center inherits that dance.

The cosmic spectacle unfolds on the stage of Galaxy галактики Centaurus A. In the lead role: a supermassive сверхмассивная чёрная дыра with a powerful jet that pierces space for hundreds of thousands of light-years.

The Universe is less than a billion years old, yet at its centers already sit black holes with masses of a billion suns. According to the conventional picture, they grew by voraciously devouring matter, but calculations show that 'feeding' must have been almost continuous, while visible quasar flares last only a few million years. So where does all the accreting fuel go?

In the center of almost every large galaxy lurks a supermassive black hole, whose gravitational abyss was first mathematically described by Karl Schwarzschild. When it swallows gas, a dazzling active nucleus is born — a quasar.

A black hole with an electric charge is like a vacuum cleaner that not only sucks in everything around it but can also hold light particles in orbit. These particles form a kind of fuzzy cloud around the hole — physicists call it a quasi-bound state.

In the boundless night of space, galaxies come together in a slow gravitational dance, merging into one. Such collisions are not head-on impacts but rather like fingers moving slowly through water, leaving swirls and tails behind.

The heart of many galaxies is a supermassive black hole. It doesn't just sit at the center; it occasionally flares brightly as it swallows surrounding gas.

Massive gas outflows from active galactic nuclei are a key regulator of galactic evolution. They sweep out the interstellar medium, quench star formation, and dictate the growth of supermassive black holes.

The giant galaxy cluster Abell S1063, lying 4 billion light-years away, works not just as a lens but as a gravitational well of time. Its mass bends space so sharply that photons from an era when the Universe was just 500 million years old slide along curved paths, like rays in slow motion, and converge on us magnified forty-three times.

At the heart of nearly every large galaxy shines an active nucleus — a supermassive black hole surrounded by a flat, rotating disk of incandescent gas. The disk itself flickers, but astrophysicists suspect that within it lurks a whole swarm of small, stellar-mass black holes.

The story began with a puzzle: in the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky noticed that clusters of galaxies behave as if an enormous invisible mass is hidden within them. Half a century later, Vera Rubin confirmed that stars on the outskirts of galaxies rotate too fast to be held by visible matter alone.

Cosmic black holes at the centers of galaxies are like giant banyan trees: their aerial root‑filaments stretch for kiloparsecs to harvest nourishing matter. For decades astronomers have debated: how does cooling gas from cluster atmospheres fall into the sphere of influence of a supermassive hole?

The expansion of the universe, discovered by Edwin Hubble, gave us a picture of the young cosmos, but along with it — difficult questions.

The beacon flares up and then nearly goes out, even though the lamp inside burns steadily. That is exactly what astronomers saw when they pointed their telescopes at the galaxy I Zwicky 1. At its center sits a supermassive black hole that devours gas and dust so greedily that a scorching disk forms around it, shining brighter than an entire galaxy.

A powerful vacuum cleaner sucks in not only dust but also its own collection bag. That's roughly how a black hole behaves at the center of a 'red dot'—a distant galaxy where the glow comes not from the hole itself but from its dense gas shroud. This shroud is so thick it resembles a puffed-up cool star. And, like many stars, it has a magnetic field.

A single graviton, a quantum of spacetime, is incredibly weak. For detectors like LIGO, built by Rainer Weiss and colleagues, quantum effects are suppressed by a factor of 10⁻³⁸: it's like trying to hear a grain of sand changing the wind's direction in a hurricane.

An alpha particle is a helium nucleus that flies out when heavy atoms decay. When it hits a gallium nitride crystal, it deposits its energy and creates an electrical pulse. The pulse height tells you how much energy the particle had.

At the center of many galaxies sits a supermassive black hole. When gas falls onto it, the gas heats up and shines brighter than an entire galaxy: this is an active galactic nucleus. Sometimes a true hurricane erupts from there: a stream of ionized gas racing at tens of percent of the speed of light.

When a star burns out and collapses under its own weight, the space around it crumples into a black hole. At the center, according to textbooks, lurks a singularity — a point where density becomes infinite and the laws of physics break down.

The black hole GRS 1915+105 usually hides behind a dense gas curtain: its X-ray emission is heavily absorbed on its way to us. But in April 2023, it suddenly flared: the X-ray flux jumped nearly tenfold.

A fountain shoots from the center of the city at a speed thousands of times faster than a courier bike. Such a 'fountain'—a stream of gas accelerated to 5500 kilometers per second — has been spotted by astronomers in the galaxy GLIMPSED-329380.

Through a telescope, you can see a galaxy that looks like a giant glowing pinwheel. Its disk stretches thirty thousand light-years across — a third of the diameter of our Milky Way. But the most astonishing part: this pinwheel already existed just two billion years after the birth of the universe.

The center of our galaxy is a crowded kitchen where several dishes are simmering at once, and their steam blends into a single cloud. X-rays from the exploded star's remnant, from the stellar wind around the supermassive black hole, and from hot gas between stars all overlap.

In the galaxy NGC 1566, located in the constellation Dorado, there is an active nucleus — a supermassive black hole surrounded by a cloud of fast-moving gas. As the gas falls toward the hole, it heats up and emits bright spectral lines. Sometimes these lines become very broad — a sign of the gas's rapid rotation.

The Fermi telescope spent 17 years recording gamma rays from the active nuclei of galaxies with giant black holes at their centers. The glow of their jets resembles a chaotic cacophony: it constantly changes.