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Mar 18, 2021 · Black holes may not be black—or even holes. A new study says their true nature could finally explain the origins of dark matter and fast radio bursts.
Jan 7, 2021 · Now that black holes can be studied directly, scientists wonder whether they really are the strange beasts Albert Einstein's theory predicts. In a simulation, seen from various angles, a black hole’s intense gravity warps the image of the disk of hot, glowing gas surrounding it.
Mar 14, 2024 · In essence, what Hawking, who died six years ago today, found is that black holes should not be truly black, because they constantly radiate a tiny amount of heat. That conclusion came...
- Davide Castelvecchi
- Einstein's "Robust Prediction"
- Gamma-Ray Bursts
- Gravitational Waves
- Invisible Companion
- X-Ray Vision
- Supermassive Black Holes
- Spaghettification
- And Finally — A Direct Image
As a theoretical possibility, black holes were predicted in 1916 by Karl Schwarzschild, who found them to be an inevitable consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity. In other words, if Einstein's theory is correct — and all the evidence suggests it is — then black holes must exist. They were subsequently put on even firmer ground by Ro...
In the 1930s, Indian astrophysicist Subramanian Chandrasekhar looked at what happens to a star when it has used up all its nuclear fuel, according to NASA. The end result, he found, depends on the star's mass. If that star is really big, say 20 solar masses, then its dense core — which may itself be three or more times the mass of the sun — collaps...
Black holes don't always exist in isolation — sometimes they occur in pairs, orbiting around each other. When they do, the gravitational interaction between them creates ripples in space-time, which propagate outward as gravitational waves — another prediction of Einstein's theory of relativity. With observatories like the Laser Interferometer Grav...
The short-lived, high-energy events that produce gamma-ray bursts and gravitational waves may be visible halfway across the observable universe, but for most of their lives black holes, by their very nature, will be almost undetectable. The fact that they don't emit any light or other radiation means they could be lurking in our cosmic neighborhood...
The first observational evidence for a black hole emerged in 1971, and this too came from a binary star system within our own galaxy. Called Cygnus X-1, the system produces some of the universe's brightest X-rays. These don't emanate from the black hole itself, or from its visible companion star — which is enormous, at 33 times the mass of our own ...
In addition to black holes created through stellar collapse, evidence suggests that supermassive black holes, each millions or even billions of solar masses, have been lurking in the centers of galaxies since early in the history of the universe, Live Science reported. In the case of so-called active galaxies, the evidence for these heavyweights is...
Another piece of evidence for the existence of black holes is … spaghettification. What, you might wonder, is spaghettification? It's what happens when you fall into a black hole, and it's pretty self-explanatory. You get stretched out into thin strands by the black hole's extreme gravitational pull. Luckily, that's not likely to happen to you or a...
So far we've had plenty of compelling indirect evidence for black holes: bursts of radiation or gravitational waves, or dynamical effects on other bodies, that couldn't have been produced by any other object known to science. But the final clincher came in April 2019, in the form of a direct image of the supermassive black hole at the center of act...
Apr 8, 2021 · Black holes are regions of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape. Rather than empty space, black holes are chock full of matter that gets...
May 20, 2024 · The black hole in question is found in a system about 10,000 light-years away called MAXI J1820+070. This system contains a black hole about 8.5 times the mass of the Sun – and a binary companion star, from which the black hole strips material as the pair of objects orbit, feeding in bursts that manifest as X-ray flickering.
Jun 14, 2013 · NASA-Led Study Explains Decades of Black Hole Observations. Francis Reddy. Jun 14, 2013. Article. A new study by astronomers at NASA, Johns Hopkins University and the Rochester Institute of Technology confirms long-held suspicions about how stellar-mass black holes produce their highest-energy light.
