Black Hole

IMAGE: Artistic representation: In a merger of neutron stars extreme temperatures and densities occur. view more  Credit: Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital, Inc. A new study lead by GSI scientists and international colleagues investigates black-hole formation in neutron star mergers. Computer simulations show that the properties of dense nuclear matter play a…

Home News This computer simulation shows supermassive black holes only 40 orbits from merging. (Image: © NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center) Black holes are notable for many things, especially their simplicity. They're just … holes. That are "black." This simplicity allows us to draw surprising parallels between black holes and…

In a series of breakthrough papers, theoretical physicists have come tantalizingly close to resolving the black hole information paradox that has entranced and bedeviled them for nearly 50 years. Information, they now say with confidence, does escape a black hole. If you jump into one, you will not be gone…

With black holes, what you see is not what you get. The ring of light visible around a black hole’s silhouette originates from a radius of about 5GM/c2, where G is Newton’s constant, M is the black hole mass and c is the speed of light. This ring is larger…

This image is part of a simulation showing the orbits of stars very close to the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Observing the stellar orbits of these stars, known as S-stars, allowed scientists to measure the spin of SgrA* and determine that it doesn’t have…

Solving the equations of general relativity for colliding black holes is no simple matter. Physicists began using supercomputers to obtain solutions to this famously hard problem back in the 1960s. In 2000, with no solutions in sight, Kip Thorne, 2018 Nobel Laureate and one of the designers of LIGO, famously…

SummaryAs children once did before Christmas, astrophysicists have been eagerly awaiting the arrival of a catalog, this one listing not toys, but cataclysmic collisions of objects such as black holes—the ghostly ultraintense gravitational fields left behind when massive stars collapse. Last week, it arrived, courtesy of the world's network of…

I’m a compulsive journal-scribbler. This habit, which goes back to my teens, has proved useful to my career. All my articles and books start as journal entries. But my motivation is not merely professional. If I don’t record my thoughts, I won’t remember them, and they won’t matter. So I…

Abstractions blogBy Adam MannNovember 3, 2020 Once missing in action, middleweight black holes have finally been detected. Now researchers are trying to figure out how they grow from small ones. Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine Until recently, black holes — those celestial spheres so dense that not even light can escape their…

Curated by MyScienceShop, the online store of Discover, this list of geek gifts for space lovers will leave any science buff captivated, kind of spooked, and curious about black holes. Black holes have hijacked the attention of science geeks everywhere. Give the gift of eternal exploration. 1. The Space &…