black-holes

Roger Penrose helped resurrect Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez showed there was a black hole in the middle of our galaxy.

Black holes could take us to the future, and maybe even the past. The hard part would be surviving the trip.

An astronomer explains why artificial black holes are pure science fiction – at least for now.

Astronomers have discovered the first dormant black hole outside of the Milky Way. These black holes are not absorbing matter from a nearby star, making them incredibly hard to find.

Astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole straying far from the centre of its galaxy using light from a star being ripped apart

Astronomers have discovered one of the rarest black hole events ever observed, revealing a massive “wandering” black hole far from the center of its home galaxy. The remarkable finding could change scientists’ understanding of how giant black holes move through the universe after galaxies collide and merge. The research, led by a team at the […] The post A Black Hole Lost in Space? Astronomers Di…

Black holes represent some of the most extreme environments in the universe. They’re the sources of the strongest consistent gravitational fields, which allows us to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to an extent that’s impossible with small objects. But we’re also reaching our limit of what we can learn about one remotely. So various authors have put forward ideas for how we might eve…

"Hawking's laws of black hole mechanics provided a satisfying connection between extreme and ordinary physics and have been the paradigm for 50 years, but they have a serious limitation."

Astronomers have discovered the first known stellar-mass black hole hiding inside the massive star cluster Omega Centauri, solving part of a mystery that has puzzled scientists for decades. Omega Centauri, located about 18,000 light-years from Earth, is the largest globular star cluster in the Milky Way. It contains around 10 million stars packed closely together. […] The post Astronomers uncover…

Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY-ASRC) have demonstrated something English mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose predicted over 50 years ago. According to Penrose, it would be possible to extract energy from a rapidly spinning (Kerr) black hole by inserting an object into the […]

Despite their depiction as massive monsters that simply suck in everything, including light, astronomers know black holes actually spin. And they spin really, really quickly at that. Determining just how quickly is key to understanding how they impact their immediate vicinity, but also the galaxies that surround them. A new paper by Tegan Thomas of the University of Virginia and her colleagues, a…

The one thing we all ‘know’ about black holes is that nothing escapes their ineluctable grasp. That is mostly true – but since the 1970s, physicists have predicted that black holes could slowly lose energy in the form of thermal radiation. This is Hawking radiation, and while it has been recreated in laboratory analogs, the […]

Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) have found that when a supermassive black hole tears apart an unlucky star, the fireworks are not over when the first flash fades. Years after the initial outburst, many of these black holes "burp" out streams of material that slam into surrounding gas and glow in radio waves, giving the NSF VLA a front‑row seat to …

Black holes are already strange enough, regions of space where gravity is so extreme that not even light can escape. But physicists have long known there's another layer of weirdness, that black holes also behave like thermodynamic objects, with temperature, entropy, and phase transitions just like a gas or a liquid. Now, a new approach borrowed from pure mathematics is revealing hidden patterns …