Black Hole

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…

New theoretical research by Michael Wondrak, Walter van Suijlekom and Heino Falcke of Radboud University has shown that Stephen Hawking was right about black holes, although not completely. Due to Hawking radiation, black holes will eventually evaporate, but the event horizon is not as crucial as had been believed. Gravity…

Space Astronomers have found strange strings of hot gas near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and they may be hurtling towards Earth By Leah Crane MeerKAT image of the galactic centre with vertical and horizontal filaments Farhad Yusef-Zadeh/Northwestern University The centre of our galaxy…

Stephen Hawking suggested that the spontaneous production and annihilation of pairs of particles must occur close to the event horizon (the region beyond which there is no escape from the gravitational pull of a black hole). He did this by cleverly combining quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of gravity. A…

Schematic of the presented gravitational particle production mechanism in a Schwarzschild spacetime. The particle production event rate is highest at small distances, whereas the escape probability (represented by the increasing escape cone (white)) is highest at large distances. Credit: arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.18521 New theoretical research by Michael Wondrak, Walter…

Some of the most violent cosmic collisions occur silently in the vacuum of space, but with the right instrumental ears, we can still hear it happen. Here’s how. When two black holes slam together, they don’t make a sound. And yet, this is what we hear if we listen closely. Let’s listen…

Space is a seemingly infinite world of wonder and discovery, filled with mysterious black holes, stunning solar flares, elusive exoplanets and countless cosmic oddities. Our team of expert science writers and editors are ready to hold a James Webb Space Telescope-size lens beyond Earth, keeping those on this planet up…