Black Hole

An illustration of a type of black hole called a blazar. A blazar is a black hole with a jet of energy that happens to be (harmlessly) aimed at Earth. Credit: M. Weiss / CFA We know, the headlines can sound terrifying. In this series, Mashable speaks with experts to…

A black hole is so compact that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light. (Image credit: Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via Getty Images) To Earthlings gazing into space, our solar system appears to be surrounded by billions of stars in the Milky Way. But if we look even…

Due to Hawking radiation, black holes will eventually evaporate, but the event horizon is not as crucial as had been believed. Gravity and the curvature of spacetime cause this radiation too. This means that all large objects in the universe, like the remnants of stars, will eventually evaporate. Using a…

Astronomers have confirmed the presence of a second supermassive black hole in the turbulent heart of a distant galaxy.  The scientists also found that both of these cosmic monsters are feeding on gas and dust and that one has a peculiar oblong orbit that sends it plunging through a massive…

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…