Tagged: black holes

The black hole information paradox was seemingly intractable. A seemingly intractable black hole paradox first proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking could finally be resolved — by wormholes through space-time. The “black hole information paradox” refers to the fact that information cannot be destroyed in the...

Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the modern age. Best known for his appearances in popular media and his lifelong battle against debilitating illness, his true impact on posterity comes from his brilliant five-decade career in science. Beginning with his doctoral...

Scientists hunting for elusive gravitational waves across the universe may be able to supercharge their discoveries with a new tool: artificial intelligence. Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime, created when a massive object is accelerated or disturbed, such as when a black hole and a...

Sometimes in science when you set out to find something you had predicted, you instead find something quite different. This was the case recently when astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope examined the core of a globular cluster, a “ball” of densely packed old stars...

In the vicinity of black holes, space is so warped that even light rays may curve around them several times. This phenomenon may enable us to see multiple versions of the same thing. While this has been known for decades, only now do we have...

Black holes are one of the most fascinating and mind-bending phenomena in the universe. The gravity of a black hole is so powerful that not even light can escape it. There are many varieties of black holes, and, in April 2021, NASA released a new...

The researchers Juan A. Fernández-Ontiveros, of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) in Rome and Teo Muñoz-Darias, of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), have written an article in which they describe the different states of activity of a large sample of supermassive black...

A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun’s mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas—called an accretion disk—that surrounds...

General relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, is best tested at its most extreme—close to the event horizon of a black hole. This regime is accessible through observations of shadows of supermassive black holes and gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of our Universe from colliding stellar-mass...

Using the SRG/eROSITA all-sky survey data, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have found two previously quiescent galaxies that now show quasi-periodic eruptions. The nuclei of these galaxies light up in X-rays every few hours, reaching peak luminosities comparable to that of...