Black Hole

In his new book, Stephen Hawking's longtime collaborator Thomas Hertog discusses the famous physicist's life and unfinished work. (Image credit: Thomas Hertog) "I hope you'll make black holes," Stephen said with a broad smile.  We exited the cargo lift that had taken us underground into the five-story cavern housing the…

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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 supermassive black hole devours matter from a violent whirlpool called accretion disk. Some of the matter is squeezed out…

The AdS/CFT duality has been reliably blowing people’s minds for over 25 years. It’s hard to visualize how such different systems as a black hole and a hot plasma could be equivalent. Now it seems that the difficulty is not just a failure of the human imagination, but a feature…

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The general theory of relativity, developed by Albert Einstein, explains how mass causes the fabric of space and time, or spacetime, to curve. The approach recasts gravity as a curving of spacetime. Even though this theory is crucial to our understanding of the universe, physicists assert that it may not…

A team of researchers has affirmed Stephen Hawking’s prediction about the evaporation of black holes via Hawking radiation, though they’ve provided a crucial modification. According to their research, the event horizon (the boundary beyond which nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational pull) is not as important as previously believed…

Radio observations of the Milky Way's center, including hundreds of newly discovered filaments (the smaller, yellowish lines and dots). (Image credit: Farhad Yusef-Zadeh/Northwestern University) Astronomers have discovered hundreds of strange, stringlike structures at the center of our galaxy, possibly tracing the violent path of an ancient black hole eruption. According…

An artist's illustration of three black holes merging. (Image credit: Shutterstock) Stephen Hawking's most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate. In 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes eventually evaporate by losing…

An international team of astrophysicists has discovered something wholly new, hidden in the center of the Milky Way galaxy. In the early 1980s, Northwestern University's Farhad Yusef-Zadeh discovered gigantic, one-dimensional filaments dangling vertically near Sagittarius A*, our galaxy's central supermassive black hole. Now, Yusef-Zadeh and his collaborators have discovered a…