Active black holes: Ultra-hot cosmic beacons
The black holes of main interest to astrophysicists are either of the stellar or of the supermassive variety. Taken by themselves, they are as black as their name indicates, and correspondingly difficult to observe. Yet under the right circumstances, these ...
Luminous disks: How black holes light up their surroundings
Gravity results in universal attraction between all masses. One possible consequence of this is , the astrophysicists' blanket term for processes in which a massive central object picks up ("accretes") matter from its direct neighbourhood. Accretion causes ...
