Black Hole

This artist’s concept shows a supermassive black hole surrounded by a disk of gas. Embedded in this disk are two smaller black holes that may have merged together to form a new black hole.Image credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) In a first, astronomers may have seen light from the merger of…

Home News Science & Astronomy An artist's depiction of two black holes merging within the disk of a supermassive black hole, later releasing a burst of light. (Image: © Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) Black holes aren't supposed to make flashes of light. It's right there in the name: black holes.Even when…

The gravitational-wave signal GW190814, detected on August 14, 2019 by NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo detector in Europe, was generated by a compact object — a neutron star or a black hole — 2.6 times the mass of our Sun merging with a black hole of…

(CNN)A mysterious astronomical object merged with a black hole 780 million light-years away and created gravitational waves that could be detected on Earth. The object exists inside what scientists call the "mass gap," a range between the heaviest known neutron star and the lightest known black hole. And it could…

An advanced civilization, perhaps an alien one, could hypothetically extract energy from a black ... hole. Getty We have something in common with alien civilizations... we both need energy. Any advanced alien civilization would, like us, need to obtain energy from their environment. For a beginning civilization, this includes burning…

Decline and fall of a galactic empire — “The empire will fall. Order will vanish. This massive event is rushing to meet us.” Jennifer Ouellette - Jun 22, 2020 11:31 pm UTC Jared Harris and Lee Pace star in Foundation, coming to Apple TV Plus in 2021.At today's 2020 Worldwide…

An elegant experiment showing that acoustic waves are amplified after scattering by a rotating body demonstrates an effect predicted in 1971 by Yakov Zel’dovich. This result has implications for the understanding of scattering from black holes. Fig. 1: A simple setup to measure Zel’dovich amplification. References1.Zel’dovich, Y. P. JETP Lett.…

A Clemson University scientist has joined forces with an international team of astronomers to identify periodic gamma-ray emissions from 11 active galaxies, paving the way for future studies of unconventional galaxies that might harbor two supermassive black holes at their centers. Among astronomers, it has long been well-established that most…

Artist’s impression of the formation of supermassive stars which evolve into a supermassive black hole. Credit: NAOJ Computer simulations conducted by astrophysicists at Tohoku University in Japan, have revealed a new theory for the origin of supermassive black holes. In this theory, the precursors of supermassive black holes grow by…

Oh, Rickrolling. Just when we think we can give you up, you prove to us, time and time again, that you will never let us down. That said, we feel we may have officially finally witnessed the inevitable climax to the decades-long meme. It began yesterday, when Rick Astley (who,…