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In a landmark discovery, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a solitary stellar-mass black hole—an object with immense gravity, yet no visible companion, quietly roaming the depths of the Milky Way galaxy. Identified in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation, this black hole is believed to be around seven times more massive than our Sun and marks the first confirmed detection of a black hole not bound to another star. The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Kailash C. Sahu and colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute, relied on more than a decade of high-precision data...

A close-up view of the center of the NGC 6505 galaxy, with the bright Einstein ring around its nucleus, captured by ESA’s Euclid space telescope. The Einstein ring is formed by gravitational lensing, with the mass of galaxy NGC 6505 bending and magnifying the light from a more distant galaxy into a ring. NGC 6505 is a well-known galaxy only around 590 million light-years from Earth, and Euclid’s discovery of a spectacular Einstein ring here was unexpected. (Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, T. Li) MUNICH — When the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope launched on July...

The galaxy PJ0116-24, located 10 billion light-years away from Earth, appears to exhibit characteristics that contradict the standard view that galaxy mergers are required to produce such intense luminosity.The groundbreaking findings, which are detailed in a newly published paper in Nature Astronomy, seem to point to the occurrence of rapid star formation in HyLIRGs, revealing that it can occur through internal processes. The discovery presents new challenges to existing notions held by astronomers about how such formations occur...In the past, it was believed that the intense luminosity produced by HyLIRGs was exclusively the result of mergers between galaxies, which result...