Tag: Black Holes

A ‘primordial’ black hole may zoom through our solar system every decade

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If microscopic black holes born a fraction of a second after the Big Bang exist, as some researchers suspect, then at least one may fly through the solar system per decade, generating tiny gravitational distortions that scientists can detect, a new study finds. These findings suggest that if astronomers can discover and confirm the existence of such gravitational disruptions, they may be able to solve the mystery behind the nature of dark matter, the unseen material that many researchers suspect makes up about five-sixths of all matter in the cosmos.…

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Scientists make lab-grown black hole jets

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An experiment using beams of protons to probe how plasma and magnetic fields interact may have just solved the mystery of how quasars and other active supermassive black holes unleash their relativistic jets. Let’s picture the scene at the heart of a quasar. A supermassive black hole, perhaps hundreds of millions — or even billions — of times the mass of our sun, is ravenously devouring matter that is streaming into its maw from a spiraling, ultra-hot disk. That charged matter is called plasma, and  it gets gravitationally drawn into…

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Supermassive black holes have masses of more than a million suns – but their growth has slowed as the universe aged

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This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Fan Zou is a graduate student at Penn State University while W. Neil Brandt is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. Black holes are remarkable astronomical objects with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them. The most gigantic ones, known as “supermassive” black holes, can weigh millions to billions times the mass of the Sun. These giants usually live in the centers of galaxies. Our own galaxy, the Milky…

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What happens if you throw a star at a black hole? Things get messy (video)

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“What happens when you throw a star at a black hole?” It’s not a question we can physically answer here on Earth.  Thankfully, actual black holes and stars can’t be smashed together in the lab! However, scientists can use advanced supercomputer modeling to simulate a black hole ripping apart and devouring a star in a so-called “tidal disruption event” or “TDE.” Doing just that, a team of researchers led by Danel Price from Monash University has discovered that the answer to our opening question is “things get messy.”  “Black holes…

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Small black holes could play ‘hide-and-seek’ with elusive supermassive black hole pairs

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Binary pairings of small black holes could be used by astronomers in a cosmic game of “hide-and-seek” to hunt much larger, yet more elusive, supermassive black hole binaries. The technique could, therefore, help solve the mystery of how supermassive black holes grew so fast in the early universe. Detecting black holes is no easy task despite their reputation as fearsome cosmic titans. All black holes are surrounded by a one-way light-trapping boundary called an “event horizon” that ensures they emit no light. Even the supermassive black holes at the hearts…

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NASA’s Fermi Finds New Feature in Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Yet Seen

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4 min read NASA’s Fermi Finds New Feature in Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Yet Seen In October 2022, astronomers were stunned by what was quickly dubbed the BOAT — the brightest-of-all-time gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now an international science team reports that data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope reveals a feature never seen before. The brightest gamma-ray burst yet recorded gave scientists a new high-energy feature to study. Learn what NASA’s Fermi mission saw, and what this feature may be telling us about the burst’s light-speed jets. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space…

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A massive black hole may be ‘waking up’ in a nearby galaxy

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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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How 2 quasars at the dawn of time could be a Rosetta stone for the early universe

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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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Hubble Telescope maps high-speed ‘burps’ from nearby feeding supermassive black hole for 1st time

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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 hole singularities defy physics. New research could finally do away with them.

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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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