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Stories about: black holes |
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Experts at the University of Colorado in Boulder (UCB) propose a new model for how the earliest black holes formed. They say that their research has led them to believe that what are now the behemoths of the skies, keeping entire galaxies in their place, originally developed inside dense, star-like cocoons, which pre... |
25 November 2009
03:35 GMT |
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Astronomers have known for a long time that the end of stars sees them transforming into a number of structures, including white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes. The thing that results after a star's demise is entirely based on the mass of said celestial body. If the mass is large, then the structure will ... |
13 November 2009
02:27 GMT |
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Usually, when analyzing the skies with advanced telescopes, the only types of black holes whose existence can be inferred from their effects on normal matter are either the small or the supermassive kind. For many years, there seemed to be no intermediary stages in their development, a fact that had astronomers puzzl... |
11 November 2009
14:31 GMT |
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By combining a number of scientific images from NASA's three Great Observatories – the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory –, scientists at the American space agency managed to create a stunning view of our galaxy, the Milky Way. The amazing photo, which was release... |
11 November 2009
01:28 GMT |
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Black holes have captured the imagination of scientists, movie producers and common folk over the years, because of their amazing traits and structures, and also due to the fact that they are unique in their own regard. There is nothing else in the Universe that resembles a black hole, or that can absorb and trap li... |
10 November 2009
02:34 GMT |
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Black holes are known to be the remnants of massive stars' collapsed cores, which fall under their own weight to an area of intense gravity that is so large, it can even absorb light. Supermassive ones can be found at the core of all large galaxies, but, even then, they cannot be accurately studied because all s... |
21 October 2009
04:57 GMT |
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Examining the properties of black holes is not precisely the easiest thing in the world to do. In fact, one may argue that it's pretty difficult, considering that there is no way of probing them directly. They would engulf any spacecraft we send in their vicinity, and they also bend and swallow light, which mean... |
20 October 2009
03:56 GMT |
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Far from being the only ones attempting to create an artificial black hole, Chinese researchers recently announced that they were able to produce the first artificial black hole for microwaves. If light in this energy spectrum enters the construct, it can no longer leave it, the team reports. Its accomplishment was m... |
14 October 2009
08:48 GMT |
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The Hubble Space Telescope has recently imaged a very weird-looking galaxy, which appears to be a two-armed spiral one at first glance. However, upon closer inspection, astronomers discovered that the formation was, in fact, the result of a massive, high-speed collision, taking place approximately 250 million light-y... |
14 October 2009
02:59 GMT |
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In a groundbreaking, new image, astronomers and astrophysicists will finally have the opportunity to study one of the rarest events in the observed Universe, namely the collision and merger of two black holes. While it may be that the current generation, and many others after it, will not live to see it, the data col... |
8 October 2009
03:44 GMT |
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The concept of entropy refers to a quantity used to measure chaos. Entropy has been on the rise in the Universe ever since the Big Bang, and a new scientific study, taking into account the latest astronomical data, has evidenced that massive black holes at the center of galaxies are the largest contributors to this i... |
2 October 2009
05:05 GMT |
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In 1988, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) astrophysicist Jack Hills used the theory of gravity to calculate the existence of a peculiar class of stars, whose members traveled faster than the galactic escape velocity. His calculations were inferred from a theoretical model in which a binary star system passed ver... |
30 September 2009
20:51 GMT |
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Black holes and space-time singularities have played a hugely important role in explaining some of astronomy's greatest mysteries, but also in popular science-fiction entertainment shows and books. However, the newest model of the Universe, developed by a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, has no room at all for thi... |
22 September 2009
08:53 GMT |
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Scientists from the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) have recently revealed the second image of the Milky Way, taken as part of the ongoing GigaGalaxy Zoom project. The first image was released less than a week ago, as we were telling you at the time. While the last photo was an i... |
21 September 2009
06:34 GMT |
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Gamma-ray Bursts (GRB) are arguably among the deadliest phenomena that can take place in the Universe. Believed to be generated in the dying throes of massive stars, these emissions exit the stars as jets of plasma, which then proceed to traveling billions of light-years in all directions. The high-energy particles t... |
19 September 2009
03:54 GMT |
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Astronomers at the University of Florida have used one of the most advanced observation instruments in the world today for the first time. The FLAMINGOS-2 (Florida Array Multi-object Imaging Grism Spectrometer) device, affixed to the eight-meter Gemini South telescope in the Chilean Andes, snapped its first picture o... |
16 September 2009
07:06 GMT |
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Established astronomical knowledge had it that galaxies with two nuclei were very rare. Experts believed that small galaxies had one made up of a star cluster, whereas the more massive ones had a black hole at their cores. But a new study comes to prove that the double-nucleus galaxy is, in fact, not that rare of an ... |
15 September 2009
02:59 GMT |
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A new, high-detail telescope image has recently revealed one of our galactic neighbors, situated relatively nearby, which mimics the Milky Way in more ways than one. The spiraled giant has been dubbed NGC 4945, following astronomers' habit of terming all cosmic objects with catchy names. In the recent photograph... |
2 September 2009
09:48 GMT |
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Black holes are relatively new additions to astronomy, having been first discovered less than half a century ago. The first one, Cygnus X-1, was found exactly 45 years ago, but it wasn't until ten years later that its true nature was finally revealed. Because they had nothing to compare it with, astronomers beli... |
1 September 2009
03:56 GMT |
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Black holes, once highly misunderstood formations, have over the years captured the imagination of astronomers and film producers alike, and have been prominently featured in films and in literature. In spite of the high levels of attention they were given, there are still a great many things that remain unknown abou... |
22 August 2009
06:31 GMT |
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According to a new complex computer simulation, it would appear that the earliest black holes that where formed after the Big Bang were in fact a lot smaller than the giants they are today. Also, the simulation revealed that older theories, which held that the formations accumulated mass quickly and gobbled up matter... |
15 August 2009
03:04 GMT |
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Scientists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have recently completed running numerous simulations of how the earliest black holes that appeared in the Universe may have looked like, and how they could have influenced the development of other forms of matter. Their investigation revealed that the structures ... |
11 August 2009
06:45 GMT |
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Scientists gained the ability to peer way back into the Universe's history some time ago, but some of the discoveries they made were not exactly in tune with some of the theories that were developed to explain astronomical phenomena today. In a recent such find, distant stars, estimated to be about 11 billion li... |
6 August 2009
01:03 GMT |
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The NASA-operated Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, is currently buzzing with excitement, as engineers are working around the clock to complete a new satellite. Dubbed the Gravity and Extreme Magnetism Small Explorer (GEMS), the instrument will systematically measure the polarization of cosmic X-ra... |
5 August 2009
06:15 GMT |
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The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported yesterday that the country had postponed the launch of its first space telescope by two years, until 2012, due to cost problems. The Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT) will be the country's first observatory, originally scheduled for launch in 2010, as part of... |
24 July 2009
19:01 GMT |
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A new, supermassive black hole, estimated to have 100 million times the mass of the Sun, has been discovered at the center of the NGC 1097 galaxy, located some 50 million light-years away from our planet. The formation became visible in a new Spitzer Space Telescope image, taken in the far- and near-infrared waveleng... |
24 July 2009
01:45 GMT |
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This very day a decade ago, NASA was celebrating the successful launch of its third Great Observatory, the Chandra X-ray Space Telescope, which was delivered to orbit by the ill-fated space shuttle Columbia, during the STS-93 mission. The TRW Inc. and Northrop Grumman-built instrument took off on July 23rd, 1999, fro... |
23 July 2009
19:11 GMT |
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The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is, undoubtedly, the most sophisticated observatory of its class in orbit today. But this title was not obtained because someone decided to call it so, but because of the revolutionary knowledge about the Universe that it brought to the world. With its highly sensitive instruments,... |
21 July 2009
15:31 GMT |
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Over the past two decades, string theory has been touted as the best chance physics have of combining quantum mechanics with general relativity. This would essentially set the basis for the long-sought-after Unified Theory of Everything (UTE), which would include all the four essential forces in the Universe – ... |
20 July 2009
03:38 GMT |
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Astronomers have recently discovered a new method of determining the speed and conditions under which supermassive black holes get thrown out of their host galaxies, when the formations collide with others, and the new black hole is larger than the first “inhabitant” of the galactic core. An international... |
10 July 2009
02:48 GMT |
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The southern constellation of Centaurus, located approximately 14 million light-years away, is home to two very important things – the massive galaxy Centaurus A and a monster black hole, which has about 50 million times the mass of our Sun. The galaxy, for some reason, cannot be viewed very clearly in optical ... |
7 July 2009
10:27 GMT |
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Astronomers and astrophysicists studying stellar nurseries – the places inside galaxies where conditions are perfect for the formation of new stars – and crowded galactic cores will soon have at their disposal a new survey of the skies, to use in assessing probabilities of where such places may exist. The... |
3 July 2009
15:01 GMT |
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In one of the largest astronomical collaborations to date, 390 scientists and four telescope arrays contributed to analyzing the very-high-energy (VHE) gamma radiation coming in from the highly active radio galaxy Messier 87, or M87. The bursts were accompanied by a strong rise of the radio flux, which the extensive ... |
3 July 2009
02:44 GMT |
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Almost everyone who is interested in space has heard about black holes, the mysterious structures in the Universe, which have the power to make massive galaxies spin around them. Up until now, these formations have been divided in only two classes – small or supermassive – although the existence of a thir... |
2 July 2009
02:30 GMT |
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Lyman-alpha blobs (LAB) are, quite simply put, the largest things in the Universe. They dwarf galaxies, and, when they were first discovered about a decade ago, seemed to only exist to annoy astronomers. Made entirely out of hydrogen gas, the blobs also glow, a feat that has had astrophysicists thinking for years. No... |
25 June 2009
02:52 GMT |
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Researchers at the Israel Institute of Technology (IIT) have managed to create a sonic black hole, a device based on Einstein-Bose condensates that is able to trap sound waves, basically acting in very much the same way a cosmic black hole does when absorbing visible light from the electromagnetic spectrum. The devic... |
18 June 2009
09:50 GMT |
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Astronomers using the Spitzer Telescope for stellar observations have recently discovered three new stars at the core of the Milky Way, which live in a particularly harsh environment. Outer space, as a whole, is not the friendliest neighborhood to live in, but the conditions that these stellar formations bear are bey... |
11 June 2009
01:40 GMT |
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Messier 87 is a nearby, giant, elliptical galaxy, which has fascinated astronomers for quite a long time. It's the largest and brightest in the northern Virgo Cluster, and it is located only 55 million light-years away from us. M87 is also a popular target with amateur and professional astronomical studies, and ... |
9 June 2009
03:26 GMT |
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In 2006, over the course of 120 days, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope observed the most peculiar object they had ever seen. A mystery flash occurred in the observer's sight, and gradually began to increase in intensity. After reaching peak light, it gradually began to disappear, and was totally gone ... |
1 June 2009
05:42 GMT |
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Astronomers observing the skies with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory recently discovered one of the most peculiar formations in the Universe, and the first one of its class ever to be found, an X-ray source that existed about three billion light-years after the creation of the Universe, and was located some ten... |
29 May 2009
16:31 GMT |
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The late UC Santa Cruz scientist Donald Coyne and Almaden Research Center expert D. C. Cheng proposed some time ago the hypothesis that all particles in existence were nothing more than mini-black holes. While disregarded at the time, the idea has gained some support in the academic community over the past years, wit... |
18 May 2009
10:19 GMT |
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J. J. Abrams, the director of the new Star Trek movie that just recently came out, apparently wanted to get all of his scientific facts right before he depicted his take on the Universe. Indeed, in one of the most epic sequences of the entire movie, the USS Enterprise, the famous ship around which the entire Star Tre... |
16 May 2009
03:10 GMT |
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Astronomers from the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics have just put forth the most compelling evidence to date that a supermassive black hole is located at the core of the Milky Way. They argue that the large amounts of matter, energy and light that are vanishing in the middle of the galaxy can only go ... |
1 May 2009
02:01 GMT |
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Since astronomers started using X-ray observatories, they noticed that the central plane of our galaxy, the Milky Way, shined with great radiation, but that it seemed to come from everywhere. In other words, scientific studies could not reveal any one source for all the X-rays, which seemed to spread from one end of ... |
30 April 2009
17:01 GMT |
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In a study to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, experts at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics argue that hundreds or thousands of rogue black holes could exist in the Milky Way, and that they could also reside all around us. Theories relat... |
30 April 2009
16:31 GMT |
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Understanding exactly how supermassive black holes were formed is a long-standing dream that astronomers have, as these behemoths of the skies could be the key to unlocking some of the secrets of the Universe. But, although theories of how they came to be are many, none manages to explain all aspects of these complex... |
23 April 2009
02:34 GMT |
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The Messier 87 galaxy, known among astronomers as M87, Virgo A, or NGC 4486, is an elliptical galaxy of massive proportions, located in the Virgo Cluster, some 55 million light-years away from Earth. For more than seven years, the Hubble Space Telescope has been following the evolution of the supermassive black hole ... |
15 April 2009
02:20 GMT |
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A black hole 14 times the size of our own Sun may seem like a really big celestial body, until you learn that there are those hundreds or maybe even thousands of time more massive than the tiny star that allows for life on Earth. The supermassive ones are able to do something that has had astronomers scratching their... |
7 April 2009
03:36 GMT |
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Stellar explosion are cosmic events of unimaginable magnitude. Seen from light-years away, they look amazing, with streams of particles being emitted everywhere around, and with remnants coloring the darkness of space. But close-by, the effects of the blast aren't nearly as pleasant, as everything around the dyi... |
4 April 2009
04:00 GMT |
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The American space agency's Fermi gamma-ray telescope has only recently finished collecting over three months' worth of cosmological observations, with which astrophysicists and other scientists have put together the most detailed and extensive map of the Universe in existence today, at least as far as radi... |
12 March 2009
10:11 GMT |
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