Gravity then causes them to collapse and blow off their outer layers in a "red giant" stage ... as the white dwarf was drawn ever closer to the black hole and the size of its orbit diminished ...

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team thinks that a dead stellar core, or white dwarf, daringly teetering on the edge of the black hole is the cause of increasingly frequent ...

Scientists have detected emanating from the nucleus of a galaxy relatively close to our Milky Way flashes of X-rays gradually ...

The white dwarf could be shedding matter and triggering the pulses observed by the researchers. As it circles closer and closer to the black hole, they hypothesize, those pulses speed up.

A white dwarf would also lose angular momentum through gravitational waves, but it also has an additional source of energy. By slowly losing its outermost material to the supermassive black hole ...

Gravity then causes them to collapse and blow off their outer layers in a "red giant" stage ... as the white dwarf was drawn ever closer to the black hole and the size of its orbit diminished ...

Astronomers theorize that a low-mass white dwarf, a compact core of a dead star about as large as Earth, could be the culprit. A cosmic mystery surrounding a black hole some 270 million light ...

Using the XMM-Newton X-ray telescope, astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole already noted for its mysterious behavior demonstrating another strange phenomenon. The Massachusetts ...