Black Hole

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Home News Something caused a giant black hole's bright corona to wink out. Researchers suspect it may have been a collision with a star, illustrated here. (Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech) Telescopes all over the world watched a bright flash appear around a distant, supermassive black hole. And then, very quickly, it…

Space 21 July 2020 By Leah Crane Could tiny black holes explain dark matter?NASA/JPL-CaltechIf black holes formed in the first seconds after the big bang, they may still be around in colossal clusters that are practically invisible. In the very early universe, everything was so dense that the radiation that…

The two illustrations on this page show a black hole surrounded by a disk of gas, before (above) and after (below) the disk is partially dispersed. In this top image, the ball of white light above the black hole is the black hole corona, a collection of ultra-hot gas particles…

An artist’s impression of the quasar Pōniuāʻena. Astronomers discovered this, the second most distant quasar ever found, using the international Gemini Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Programs of NSF’s NOIRLab. It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name. In honor of its discovery from Maunakea,…

Home News Science & Astronomy Because black holes can't be studied directly, scientists often watch their feeding habits to understand what these behemoths are doing. So what does it mean when a black hole suddenly stops gobbling up gas completely — and then just as suddenly starts again, hungrier than…

Home News Left: An illustration shows what a shrouded black hole might look like. Right: An image of the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S) highlights where the new cocooned black holes were detected. (Image: © Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Penn State/B.Luo et al; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss) More than two dozen missing "cocooned" black…

Home News Science & Astronomy A simulated image of two black holes colliding. (Image: © SXS/LIGO) Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of "How to Die in Space." He contributed this article…

In physics, we discover a new law by making a guess, and then comparing the consequences of the guess with experimental results. As the ever-quotable Richard Feynman put it: “It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are…

Amir Siraj and Professor Avi Loeb from the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University have developed a new method to search for primordial black holes in the outer Solar System, based on accretion flares that result from impacts of small bodies from the Oort Cloud. Siraj & Loeb explore the…