A faint, ghostly galaxy 10 million light-years away has delivered one of black hole astronomy’s holy grails. At the bottom is a black hole that appears to belong to an elusive middleweight class of intermediate-mass black holes, a discovery that could help us understand how some of the more massive …
Read More »Photo: Samuel Corum (fake pictures) Over the past week, House of Representatives lawmakers have taken a brief pause, for example, probe on potential Silicon Valley antitrust issues, and deciding How we should all feel about the FBI’s practice of wiretapping without a warrant, in the name of rallying around a …
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A 50-year theoretical process to extract energy from a spinning black hole finally has experimental verification. Using an analogue of the required components, physicists have shown that the Penrose process is indeed a plausible mechanism for extracting some of that rotational energy, if we could ever develop the means. That …
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In August last year, the LIGO and Virgo collaborations made a gravitational wave detection, the first of its kind, in what appeared to be a black hole swallowing a neutron star. Now LIGO has confirmed the event, giving it the name of GW190814. And it appears that the neutron star …
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Across the Universe, there are numerous examples of galaxies coming together in colossal mergers, a billion-year-old process that stains stars and gas in the surrounding space. For the most part, we know how this unfolds, but we don’t know what happens to supermassive black holes within their galactic centers. Astronomers …
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