A research team from the Yunnan Observatories of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), in collaboration with other researchers, has developed a new method to estimate how stellar-mass compact objects ...

Lab top accretion disc: Cutaway diagram of the experimental setup used by Wang and colleagues. The data shown in the left portion of the gap between cylinders illustrates the simulated shear profile ...

Spin transfer Artist’s impression of an accretion disc surrounding a black hole. (Courtesy: Shutterstock/oorka) Researchers in France have created a new experiment that could improve our understanding ...

Supermassive black holes that weigh several billion times the mass of our Sun are present at the centres of active galaxies. Astronomers observe them as bright galactic cores where the galaxy’s ...

Associate Professor CAI Zhenyi and Professor WANG Junxian from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), through ...

Black holes are regions of austere darkness, gobbling up everything — even light — that strays too close. But the environment immediately surrounding a black hole is not so dark. Astronomers often ...

Low-mass stars form through a process known as disk accretion, eating up material that orbits in a disk around them. It turns out that the same mechanism also describes the formation of more massive ...

Stars of spectral type 'Be' are often found with neutron stars or other evolved analogues, but a black-hole companion has never been spotted before. Optical emission from a black hole's surroundings ...