Stellar Cradle Discovered Near Galaxy's Black Hole
	The worst place where a star could grow is in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, as powerful gravitational fields exerted by the latter prevent the clouds of gas to condense into objects such as our Sun. However, astronomers have recently discovered that young stars do form near the center of our galaxy, inside a ring-shaped cloud of gas thought to surround the Milky Way's black hole, Sagittarius A*. This region of space, s ... [read more >>]
	24 July 2008, 04:15GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Observations Confirm Theory: Quasars Have Accretion Discs
	It was long predicted that quasars may in fact be black holes found in the center of large discs of hot matter. However, it was never really proven through observations that this was in fact true. Confirmation now comes from a team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn who used a light polarization technique to show how the surroundings of a black hole are able to output an amount of light one trillion ti ... [read more >>]
	24 July 2008, 02:45GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Weighing Supermassive Black Holes with Light
	The weight of supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies is usually estimated by measuring the effects of the huge gravitational fields on the objects located in the vicinity of the black holes in question. Now, a new and precise weighing method developed at the University of California with the help of data provided by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, estimates the mass of supermassive black holes simply by measuring t ... [read more >>]
	17 July 2008, 11:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gamma-ray Burst Afterglows Move from Bright to Brighter
	Gamma-ray bursts are the brightest and most powerful type of electromagnetic radiation that can be emitted in the universe in the outcome of a violent stellar explosion, whose afterglow remains extremely bright up to several hours after the occurrence of the event that generated it. A new study found that afterglows determined by short gamma-ray bursts are in fact brighter than typical ones. According to current models, gamma- ... [read more >>]
	09 July 2008, 03:42GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Holes and Qubits Appear to Have Quite A Lot in Common
	At first glance, black holes and qubits seem to be two completely different entities and indeed they are, although they seem to share a great deal of resemblances. For example, last year, Michael Duff from the Imperial College London first demonstrated a connection between the entropy of a black hole and the ways three qubits can be entangled. And apparently it doesn't stop here, as more and more connections between the two sprung up ... [read more >>]
	04 July 2008, 10:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Future Space Mission Could Study the Weird Space Surrounding Black Holes
	Black holes produce gravitational fields so powerful that they are able to shape space-time around them. However, what shape that particular volume of space surrounding the black hole might take under the influence of such an extreme gravitational field is unknown, as are the effects that might produce the powerful magnetic field generated by a magnetar. Imaging the gravitational or magnetic field of such objects is basically impossible, n ... [read more >>]
	02 July 2008, 05:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Holes in LHC Small Enough to Be Ignored
	The Large Hadron Collider is rapidly approaching completion and should become operational by the end of the year. It will become the biggest particle collider ever built, probably powerful enough to create even microscopic black holes. It has been suggested on a number of occasions, despite CERN’s reassurance, that such a microscopic black hole would come to accrete matter and grow so big that it would eventually destroy the Earth and even ... [read more >>]
	01 July 2008, 03:18GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

GLAST Blasts into Space
	One of the most expected launches of the year was carried out yesterday at approximately 12:05 pm EDT from NASA's Launch Complex 17-B at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, with the help of a Delta II rocket. The newest high-energy gamma-ray space observatory GLAST was launched into space and inserted into Earth's orbit at an altitude of 550 kilometers. The Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, or GLAST for short, will have a p ... [read more >>]
	12 June 2008, 03:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gamma-ray Observatory Finds New Exotic Binary System
	Supergiant high-mass X-ray binaries, HMXB for short, are stellar systems consisting of a supergiant star and a neutron star orbiting around it. HMXBs are relatively rare in the universe and are believed to be only a short phase in the life of binary star systems. At the time when ESA's gamma-ray space observatory – Integral – was launched into space about six years ago only seven such stellar systems were known to exist. Meanwhile, In ... [read more >>]
	11 June 2008, 10:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New X-ray Nanomirror Developed at MIT
	Investigations in the X-ray spectrum are critical for astronomers, especially in studying extremely violent interactions produced by black holes, neutron stars and dark energy. The problem with X-ray light is that it’s hard to collect since most of the X-ray sources in the sky are very faint, not to mention that ground based observations in this spectrum are totally disabled by the fact that Earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to X-ra ... [read more >>]
	10 June 2008, 06:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Find the Most Distant Quasar in the Universe
	Quasi stellar objects, or quasars, are the most powerful celestial bodies in the universe, capable of emitting enough energy to be observable across the whole visible universe. The European VLBI Network of radio telescopes has now discovered what appears to be the most distant quasar ever detected. Observations were carried out in the 1.6 GHz frequency with ten radio telescopes scattered across Europe, China and South Africa. [ADMARK=1 ... [read more >>]
	07 June 2008, 03:45GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Expected Eclipse Could Reveal the Secrets of Epsilon Aurigae
	At the center of the Auriga constellation lies one of the weirdest star systems in the universe, Epsilon Aurigae, an F-type star about 389 million kilometers across that is being eclipsed every 27 years by an even larger disk of matter orbiting around it. That particular object could just as well become one of the greatest structures in the universe and is believed to house two small stars in the middle, a black hole or a single large star ... [read more >>]
	06 June 2008, 10:54GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Supermassive Black Holes Make Galactic Arms Wrap Tighter
	It is widely believed that every galaxy in the universe hosts a supermassive black hole at its core, with a mass ranging between ten thousand and a few billion times that of the Sun. Marc Sigar from the University of Arkansas claims that with the help of images provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, he and his team established a relationship between the mass of the central supermassive black hole and the arms wrapped around spiral galaxie ... [read more >>]
	03 June 2008, 03:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Weird Ring around Magnetar, a New Dilemma for Astronomers
	In 2005 and 2007, NASA Spitzer Space Telescope detected two narrow infrared signatures near the magnetar dubbed SGR 1900+14, suggesting that the star was surrounded by a ring of matter that remained in its vicinity after the progenitor star went 'nova'. SGR 1900+14 is a neutron star with a magnetic field a trillion times more powerful than that of Earth and a soft gamma repeater, meaning that it regularly generates gamma-ray burs ... [read more >>]
	29 May 2008, 04:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

GLAST to Blast into Space on June 3rd
	NASA's GLAST satellite, or the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope, set to study the universe at its highest energies was scheduled for launch on June 3rd, between 11:45 a.m. and 1:40 p.m. EDT from the Launch Complex 17 at NASA's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. GLAST will be carried into space with the help of a Delta 7920H-10C rocket and inserted into a circular orbit around Earth, at an altitude of 550 kilometers, bearing an ... [read more >>]
	26 May 2008, 09:35GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Supermassive Black Hole Progenitors Still a Mystery
	Supermassive black holes, weighing several billion times more than the Sun, are widely believed to have begun their lives as smaller black holes that fed on the large masses of gas surrounding them. Computer models however tell another story. Small black holes cannot feed and grow rapidly to super-size because there's not much to feed on. Supermassive black holes are usually found inside quasi-stellar objects, swallowing ... [read more >>]
	20 May 2008, 03:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Theory Could Explain the Information Paradox
	In the 1970s Stephen Hawking showed that singularities, and therefore black holes, can exist in our space-time continuum. He also revealed that although black holes radiate mass and energy in the surrounding medium through the event horizon, information falling into a black hole would be lost forever, meaning that matter falling into a black hole and emerging later through the event horizon cannot be identified as being one and the same. ... [read more >>]
	15 May 2008, 04:38GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Holes Are Not Black
	Theory says that black holes are objects of extreme mass and density, having powerful gravitational fields able to warp space and time, and surrounded by a boundary called the event horizon, beyond which matter and energy cannot escape the gravitational pull and will ultimately fall in the singularity. In addition to this, in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking stated that black holes were not entirely black, meaning that they did emit some form of ... [read more >>]
	13 May 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

World's Most Powerful Computer Will Be Housed by NASA
	The device will be developed and built by the Intel Corporation and the SGI, and will be installed at NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at the Ames Research Center. It is expected to become operational by 2009, when it will have a computational power of one petaflops. Then, until 2012, the new supercomputer will receive upgrades that are supposed to bring it to a computational power of 10 petaflops. By comparison, NASA's fastest c ... [read more >>]
	12 May 2008, 11:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Operation Code Name 'Vanished Star'
	The vast majority of stars end their lives through supernova explosions while others, more massive, are thought unable to produce such explosions simply because they implode and collapse under their own weight only to produce a black hole. Since these particular types of stellar death don't generate brilliant emissions in the electromagnetic spectrum, none has ever been witnessed. This is about to change with the initiation ... [read more >>]
	10 May 2008, 03:44GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Colossal Black Hole Seen Drifting Away from Home Galaxy
	It has been theorized some time ago that supermassive black holes may be ejected from their galaxy during a galactic collision. However, until now such event remained unobserved. When two or more galaxies merge into a single one their supermassive black holes may also merge, albeit the energy released during such a process would throw the merger out of its home world. "We have observed the pre-merger stages of black holes. But we h ... [read more >>]
	30 April 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Unveil the Workings of Supermassive Black Hole Particle Jets
	Supermassive black holes are mostly found in galactic nuclei, ejecting matter in the form of particle jets at relativistic speeds during the 'feeding' process. According to theory, these particle jets are accelerated to these speeds by tightly-twisted magnetic fields generated in the close proximity of the black hole. However, confirming this theory has proved rather problematic until now. National Ratio Astronomy Obser ... [read more >>]
	24 April 2008, 02:58GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Light Echo Helps Map Galactic Nucleus
	Light echoes are generated when interstellar or intergalactic gas is ionized by electromagnetic emissions originating several light years away, and responds accordingly by releasing the surplus energy by emitting light. By observing such light echoes, astronomers can witness events that occurred several hundred of thousand years into the past, like supernova explosions or even a black hole in a 'feeding' process. You might ha ... [read more >>]
	19 April 2008, 04:04GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Quasar Confirms General Relativity Prediction
	The Theory of General Relativity predicts that objects of great mass – such as stars, neutron stars, black holes and so on – have the ability of severely warping the fabric of space-time due to their powerful gravitational pull. The prediction was first verified in 1919, when Arthur Eddington allegedly detected such warps in the fabric of the universe on the orbit of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun. Now, researchers claim to have ev ... [read more >>]
	17 April 2008, 02:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Hole Pioneer Dies at 96
	John Wheeler died on 13 April, aged 96. He was the first to coin the term 'black hole', helped develop the theory of nuclear fission and one of the great physicists to participate in the Manhattan project, the first program to create a working nuclear weapon during World War II. John Wheeler was born in Jacksonville, Florida on 9 July 1911. At the age of 16, he went to Johns Hopkins University, where he studied physics, ... [read more >>]
	16 April 2008, 05:56GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Milky Way's Black Hole Awoke Three Centuries Ago
	With the help of observations made with NASA, JAXA and ESA's X-ray satellites, astronomers revealed that the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, dubbed Sagittarius A*, suffered a massive outburst some three centuries ago. Sagittarius A* is about 4 million times more massive than the Sun, however the energy emitted while 'feeding' is several billion times weaker than the energy emitted by similar su ... [read more >>]
	16 April 2008, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Next Generation Gravitational Wave Detectors to Use Squeezed Light
	There are quite a few large laser interferometers in the world today, including the two LIGO detectors in the US, specially constructed to test the existence of gravitational waves, distortions in the fabric of space-time determined by gravitational interactions between very massive cosmic bodies, such as the merging of black holes of neutron stars. However, with the current sensitivity of these detectors, gravitational waves would probabl ... [read more >>]
	14 April 2008, 04:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Brightest Explosion in the Universe Still Glowing
	Three weeks ago, the Swift satellite detected the brightest gamma-ray burst in the visible universe in a galaxy located more than 7 billion light years away from Earth. It is though that the supernova explosion could have been the result of the collapse of a massive star into a black hole, and that, during the explosion, its brightness outpowered that of the Milky Way by at least five million times. Yet, after three weeks, the ga ... [read more >>]
	12 April 2008, 03:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Spitzer Pictures Omega Centauri Star Cluster
	Globular star clusters are believed to be amongst the oldest objects in the universe, some of them probably being more than 12 billion years old. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is home to about 200 globular star clusters, amongst which the Omega Centauri star cluster, the biggest and brightest of all. Although it is located about 18,300 light years away from Earth, the Omega Centauri star cluster is clearly visible with the naked eye ... [read more >>]
	11 April 2008, 03:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Internet Black Holes Make Data Mysteriously Disappear
	Server downtime and maintenance are not the only factors that sometimes block users from reaching their favorite webpages. It's true that server and hosting technical problems are the main reasons the websites fail to load, but researchers have unveiled another mysterious possibility that prevents you from reaching your desired page. "There's an assumption that if you have a working Internet connection then you ... [read more >>]
	09 April 2008, 04:16GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Quasars May Stop Star Formation in Galaxies
	Quasars are basically massive black holes surrounded by large accretion disks of matter and can be mostly found in active galactic nuclei. As they swallow large quantities of matter, quasars may eject gas into the interstellar space, so that star formation processes are stopped and the galaxy housing it evolves passively in time. By studying the light of about 360,000 galaxies in the local universe, researchers from the Astrophysics Resear ... [read more >>]
	09 April 2008, 03:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Weighing Supermassive Black Holes
	Weighing supermassive black holes located in the center of galactic nuclei is more like looking through a solid brick wall, since matter in quantities of billions of times the mass of the Sun may stand in the way. Nonetheless, we are capable today to approximate the masses of supermassive black holes just by observing how that large amount of matter surrounding it moves through the space. If the theory and calculations are correct, the ... [read more >>]
	09 April 2008, 02:51GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Rare Type of Quasi-Stellar Object Discovered
	Quasars are basically black holes surrounded by large accretion disks of matter spinning around them. As matter is being drawn to the central black hole, it heats up and starts emitting high amounts of radiation, while powerful magnetic fields eject part of the material back into the surrounding space before crossing the event horizon. Eventually, this material will flow into interstellar space, where it creates disturbances so powerfu ... [read more >>]
	07 April 2008, 09:40GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Do Supermassive Stars Explode?
	Previous stellar models showed very clearly that all stars must go through a supernova stage at the end of their lives; however, a new study reveals that supermassive stars may not be able to generate supernova explosions, but they would rather suffer a sudden gravitational collapse to turn into a black hole. But if a supermassive star would be able to 'go nova', then the explosion would be relatively mild in comparison to that o ... [read more >>]
	07 April 2008, 08:57GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Medium Black Hole May Be Hiding in Omega Centauri
	Omega Centauri is one of Milky Way's most massive globular star cluster, located about 17,000 light years away from Earth and containing several millions of stars. Evidence suggests that there may be a massive object in its core, with tremendous gravitational pull, possibly a medium-sized black hole with a mass estimated at about 40,000 solar masses. Usually, globular star clusters are held together only by the collective [ADMARK= ... [read more >>]
	02 April 2008, 10:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

NASA Discovers the Tiniest Black Hole Ever
	The biggest black hole ever found in the universe weighs a staggering 18 billion times the mass of the Sun; however, NASA now discovered what seems to be the smallest black hole ever known. It has a mass 3.8 times that of the Sun and a diameter of about 24 kilometers. It was discovered with the help of NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite back in 2001, inside a binary system, known as XTE J1650-500, within our galaxy. Even ... [read more >>]
	02 April 2008, 03:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

SN 2006bc Supernova Explosion
	NGC 2397 is just another spiral galaxy presenting prominent dust lanes along its arms; older stars in its central regions and newly forming stars in the spiral arms are shown blue in this image. The galaxy is located about 60 million light-years away from Earth, however the Hubble Space Telescope is still able to produce high enough resolution images of it, so that individual stars can be observed in the active star formation reg ... [read more >>]
	01 April 2008, 04:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

LHC to Destroy the Earth... Not
	The Large Hadron Collider is quickly approaching completion and is expected to begin operation by the middle of the this year. However, while physicists are barely waiting to start experimenting with the world's most powerful particle accelerator, campaigners in the United States would give anything to see the LHC delayed as long as possible or to stop it from ever operating altogether. They believe that, during experiments, dangerous ... [read more >>]
	29 March 2008, 04:57GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gamma-Ray Burst, Brightest in the Universe
	The most powerful gamma-ray emission ever seen in the universe was detected yesterday by the Swift satellite, and originated from an area of space more than seven thousand times further away than the distance to the Andromeda galaxy. It was probably created by a massive star in the final stages of life that collapsed into a black hole. University of Leicester researchers say that the brightness of the GRB exceeded that of the whole Milky W ... [read more >>]
	20 March 2008, 11:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Holes Spell Death for Earth!
	They are out there, we know what kind of destruction their capable of, however we have also been lucky enough not have such an object forming in the vicinity of our solar system. Or haven't we? Our biggest threat right now, however, doesn't come from black holes, death rays of any kind or other impending disaster. It comes from asteroids, rogue pieces of rock traveling through our solar system. And as that wasn't h ... [read more >>]
	11 March 2008, 07:02GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Hole Collisions Revealed by Infrared Glows
	Behemoths up to a billion times the mass of our Sun lie in our universe, swallowing up matter to hide it forever from the eyes of any outside observers. Not even light can escape their massive gravitational pull, that's why they are called black holes; they do not emit any form of electromagnetic radiation, thus no light. This is the biggest problem in the study of black holes, we as humans depend in a great proportion on observations ... [read more >>]
	04 March 2008, 09:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Black Holes Replicated in Laboratory Conditions!
	Black holes are some of the most mysterious objects in the whole universe. Except a handful of properties, almost nothing is known about what lies beyond their event horizon, whether it's a wormhole, a ultra-dense singularity or some other structure we have no knowledge about. And here is the worst part of the problem, we may never peer beyond the event horizon of a black hole to see what lies inside it. I mean one may obser ... [read more >>]
	14 February 2008, 05:31GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

SUGAR to Listen for Black Hole Music
	80 computers, 320 CPUs of power, 640 Gigabytes of RAM and 96 terabytes of hard disk memory. If that's not music to your years, I don't know what music is. Don't be fooled by the name though, the SUGAR complex will be the new supercomputer complex which will help physicists at the California Institute of Technology to process the massive amounts of information received from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wav ... [read more >>]
	11 February 2008, 04:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Chandra Finds Neutron X-ray Emitting Star
	Previously, astronomers believed that only black holes are capable to emit powerful X-ray jets, but a new study conducted at the Penn State University shows that, in fact, any class of object may be able to some extent to form powerful X-ray jets. A newly discovered neutron star seems to present features relatively similar to that of a black hole, which lays base for the prediction that X-ray emissions are actually generated by p ... [read more >>]
	05 February 2008, 03:01GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Will We Ever be Able to Travel to Parallel Universes?
	Wormholes, time travel, white holes, extra spacial dimensions, parallel universes - all arose as solutions to Einstein's equations of general relativity, meaning theoretical physics predicts they should all be likely to exist in the fabric of space-time. But will we ever be able to open a wormhole into space-time to travel towards a parallel universe, and how would we even know if we did? Russian physicist Alexander Shatskiy ... [read more >>]
	31 January 2008, 04:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Predict the Existence of Strange Supernova Type
	Supernova explosions are generally triggered by a unbalance between the gravitational force produced by the star and the thermonuclear fusion reactions. Nonetheless, astronomers argue that such explosions could be determined through more stronger interactions, like those between a white dwarf and a medium size black hole. As the black hole pulls on the white dwarf with extreme gravitational force, the matter would become so compr ... [read more >>]
	30 January 2008, 04:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Rogue Speeding Star Comes from LMC, Scientists Say
	In 2005, astronomers discovered a star traveling away from the Milky Way at hypervelocities, thus they argued that it must have somehow been ejected from the central regions of the galaxy during interactions with the supermassive black hole. However, HE 0437-5439 posed a great mystery. How could a 35-million-year-old star travel a distance that would usually take at least 100 million years to complete at the current speed of the star? ... [read more >>]
	28 January 2008, 11:08GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gamma-ray Bursts: Introduction into History
	Try taking a look at the night sky for a while, from time to time. It's kind of boring, isn't it? Nothing ever happens, there is peace and quiet everywhere you look. Or is it? Astronomers say the universe is a chaotic place, where massive explosions take place all the time in order to release large amounts of energy in the form of gamma-ray bursts, and there is nothing more violent that the emission of gamma-ray radiation. Noneth ... [read more >>]
	25 January 2008, 10:21GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Just Add Primordial Black Holes, Antimatter Will Soon Follow...
	The Big Bang theory suggests that, in the early life stages of the universe, a massive number of black holes might have been created. Although not as massive as most of the black holes created from stellar remnants, a part of these tiny black holes might still be lurking through space. In the 1970s, the famous physicists Stephen Hawking showed that singularities are allowed to exist in the fabric of space-time. Furthermore, a bla ... [read more >>]
	23 January 2008, 06:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia