Tag: Black Holes

In December of 2019, the sky-scanning Zwicky Transient Facility — a telescope perched on California’s Palomar Mountain — alerted astronomers to a sudden flare coming from an otherwise unremarkable galaxy some 300 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. The flare’s intensity dipped and peaked dramatically over four years, but it continues to persist even today. That’s unusually long for such a flare — so long, in fact, that it can’t be explained by any typical cosmic phenomena. “This behavior is unprecedented,” Paula Sánchez-Sáez, an astronomer at the European…

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A double quasar spiraling toward a great merger has been discovered lighting up the “cosmic dawn,” just 900 million years after the Big Bang. They are the first quasar pair spotted that far back in cosmic time. Quasars are rapidly growing supermassive black holes in the cores of hyperactive galaxies. Torrents of gas are thrust down the black holes’ throats and get hung up in the bottleneck of an accretion disk, which is a dense ring of ultrahot gas that is queuing up to fall into the black hole. Not…

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Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time ever, mapped the plasma “burps” of a feeding supermassive black hole-powered quasar that dwells relatively close to Earth.  While supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the sun are thought to dwell at the heart of all galaxies, not all of these cosmic titans power quasars. Some, like the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, are relatively quiet because they are not greedily feeding on matter around…

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Black holes are some of the most enigmatic objects in the universe, capable of deforming the fabric of space around them so violently that not even light can escape their gravitational grip. But it turns out, much of what scientists know about these mysterious objects could be wrong. According to new research, published in April in the journal Physical Review D, black holes could actually be entirely different celestial entities known as gravastars. “Gravastars are hypothetical astronomical objects that were introduced [in 2001] as alternatives to black holes,” study co-author…

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Scientists have confirmed, for the first time, that the very fabric of spacetime takes a “final plunge” at the edge of a black hole.  The observation of this plunging region around black holes was made by astrophysicists at Oxford University Physics, and helps validate a key prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1915 theory of gravity: general relativity.  The Oxford team made the discovery while focusing on regions surrounding stellar-mass black holes in binaries with companion stars located relatively close to Earth. The researchers utilized X-ray data collected from a range of…

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Black hole week reaches its conclusion today (May 10), and there’s no better way to mark the occasion than with some “eggs-traordinary” black hole science. Using gravitational wave measurements by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), based in the U.S., and the Virgo and KAGRA detectors, located in Italy and Japan, respectively, scientists have found that the orbits of some binary black holes could be egg-shaped and exhibit a curious wobble. This research is more than a mere curiosity (and an “eggs-cuse” to crack some bad egg-related puns). The discovery…

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NASA’s forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could use the grisly death of stars ripped apart by black holes to hunt the universe’s first population of stellar bodies. These early stars, referred to (somewhat confusingly) as Population III (Pop III) stars, were very different from the sun and other stars seen in the cosmos today. That’s because the universe wasn’t yet filled with “metals,” the term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than hydrogen and helium.  Pop III stars arose just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang and…

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Black hole week is in full swing, and to celebrate, NASA has explained how its next major astronomical instrument, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will hunt for tiny black holes that date back to the Big Bang. When we think of black holes, we tend to picture vast cosmic monsters like stellar-mass black holes with masses tens to hundreds of times that of the sun. We may even picture supermassive black holes with masses millions (or even billions) of times that of the sun sitting at the hearts of…

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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has observed light from stars surrounding some of the earlier supermassive black holes in the universe — black holes seen as they were less than a billion years after the Big Bang.  The observations conducted by a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) addresses the question of how these cosmic titans that sit at the hearts of galaxies grew to tremendous masses, equivalent to millions (sometimes even billions) of suns. More specifically, how did they grow so rapidly? The findings could also…

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Scientists have used artificial intelligence to construct a three-dimensional model of an energetic outburst, or flare, that occurred around the Milky Way’s central black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). This 3D model could help scientists develop a clearer picture of the tumultuous environment that forms around supermassive black holes in general. The material swirling around Sgr A* exists in a flattened structure called an “accretion disk” that can periodically flare. These flares occur across a range of light wavelengths, all the way from high-energy X-rays to low-energy infrared light and…

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