Black Hole

An artist's impression of a black hole. Could these cosmic monsters devour the entire universe? (Image credit: MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images) Black holes are infamous for their immense gravity — they can swallow stars, planets and even other black holes.  But could a black hole consume the…

Akers had already convinced himself that the conversion program should be written in the language of quantum error correction, as Harlow had already worked out for empty space. The semiclassical interior would be the message, and the quantum exterior would be the transmission. And given that the interior seemed to…

One of the universe’s most unusual phenomena is black holes. The chirping sound that two black holes make when they merge can be heard using gravitational-wave detectors; about 70 such chirps have been discovered so far.  The “ocean of voices” in which chirps are thought to predominately occur in two…

This illustration shows, as seen by NASA's IXPE mission, the blazar Markarian 421 blasting out high-energy jet. (Image credit: NASA/Pablo Garcia) A NASA mission has observed a supermassive black hole pointing its highly energetic jet straight toward Earth. Don't panic just yet, though. As fearsome as this cosmic event  is,…

Artist's depiction of microquasar event captured by FAST Telescope. Credit: Professor Wei Wang, Wuhan University Black holes are the most mysterious objects in the universe, with features that sound like they come straight from a sci-fi movie. Stellar-mass black holes with masses of roughly 10 suns, for example, reveal their…

News Science & Astronomy An illustration shows the blazar Markarian 421 blasting out high-energy jet as seen by NASA's IXPE mission. (Image credit: NASA/Pablo Garcia) A NASA mission has observed a supermassive black hole pointing its highly energetic jet straight toward Earth. Don't panic just yet, though. As fearsome as…

Very advanced civilizations could graduate from using regular stars for power and use black holes. Manufacturing of antimatter is hugely energy-inefficient, and antimatter is difficult to contain. The process of generating a Black hole from collapse is naturally efficient. It would require millions of times less energy than a comparable…

J. Robert Oppenheimer, now the protagonist of a much-anticipated film hitting theaters on July 21, is today most known for his scientific leadership of the U.S. Manhattan Project, the World War II–era crash program to build the first-ever atomic bombs. But just a few years earlier, Oppenheimer had found himself…

This NASA illustration shows the structure of a black hole jet as inferred by recent observations of the blazar Markarian 421 by the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE). The jet is powered by an accretion disk, shown at the bottom of the image, which orbits and falls into the black…

In a first, astronomers have observed time ticking in slow motion in the early cosmos, confirming Albert Einstein’s century-old ideas about the reality-warping effects of our universe’s expansion. By tracking the flickering glows of luminous matter swirling through galaxies when the universe was a mere one billion years old (less…