[ad_1] As Vanderbilt University research assistant professor, Dr. Karam Jani, explained to Engadget, the signal itself was minuscule — a mere four squiggly lines lasting just a tenth of a second — but its implications for our understanding of the cosmos are immense. “We were able to confirm that this came from a collision of […]
Category: black hole
Astronomers may have spotted light from colliding black holes
[ad_1] Black hole collisions tend not to produce light by their very nature — you may catch gravitational waves, but that’s about it. However, scientists might have just found one of those rare instances where a collision was visible. A team using May 2019 data from both the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and Europe’s […]
Scientists find the closest known black hole to date
[ad_1] Don’t worry about being so close to an all-consuming beast. Unlike some black holes, such as the supermassive one believed to be at the heart of our galaxy, this one is both small and doesn’t “violently” interact with its surroundings or broadcast its presence with X-rays. It’s one of the first discovered stellar-mass holes […]
Scientists visualize a black hole plasma jet in unprecedented detail
[ad_1] When a supermassive black hole features such jets, it’s classified as a blazar. Astronomers posit that the magnetic poles of the black hole channel the energy up from the accretion disc and shoot it out with a tremendous amount of energy — the jet captured in the image is traveling at about 0.995 times […]
Astronomers find stellar black hole so large it shouldn’t exist
[ad_1] The team used China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) to find stars orbiting objects that are seemingly invisible — a technique that had been proposed back in 1783, but hadn’t really been possible until recently. They then used both the US’ Keck I telescope and Spain’s Gran Telescopio Canarias to determine […]
Scientists find a hidden black hole using new detection method
[ad_1] Black holes swallow light, which makes them impossible to observe directly. The easiest black holes to spot are those which form a binary system with a star, such as the Cygnus X-1 black hole which is paired with a blue supergiant. As the black hole and the star orbit around each other, the black […]
The first ever black hole image lands scientists $3 million prize
[ad_1] The prize will be split between the 347 scientists that worked on the ground-breaking project, which produced the very first image of a black hole. The data behind the image — which could confirm or at least pose significant questions about our understanding of the universe — was equivalent to the number of selfies […]
Scientists find the largest observed black hole to date
[ad_1] The team spotted the black hole using data from the Very Large Telescope array. The wealth of extra data from the Chile observatory helped them map the structure of Holm 15A in unprecedented detail, helping them run simulations to explain the galaxy’s formation and its unusually faint center. Simply speaking, the black hole is […]
Russia launches X-ray telescope to find ‘millions’ of black holes
[ad_1] Spektr-RG is expected to conduct an exceptionally detailed 6.5-year survey that could discover roughly 100,000 galaxy clusters, hundreds of thousands of active stars and about 3 million supermassive black holes. In addition to providing a more detailed map of the cosmos, it could help understand the formation of black holes, the distribution of matter […]
X-rays help astronomers detect spinning black holes
[ad_1] The team used an in-between galaxy to get clear images of quasars consisting of the black holes, with Chandra offering a sharp-enough image to separate the multiple images that resulted from the lensing effect. From there, microlensing (in this case, magnification using individual stars from the galaxy) helped detect the spin in question. The […]