The sound of a binary black hole’s echoes, courtesy of MIT’s Erin Kara and Kyle Keane. Animation computed by Michal Dovciak. Black holes feeding on companion stars can go through cycles where they emit high-energy outbursts. MIT astronomers are using X-ray echoes from those cycles to map out the environment around these exotic objects, similar […]
Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link) Of all the amazing and varied phenomena in the cosmological zoo, black holes are among the most mysterious. They are zombies—the all-devouring corpses of dead stars, made of trillions of tons of stellar ash compressed into an infinitely dense point called a “singularity.” […]
Enlarge / Artist’s representation of the merger of two neutron stars to form a black hole (hidden within bright bulge at center of image). The merger generates opposing, high-energy jets of material (blue) that heat up material around the stars, making it emit X-rays (reddish clouds). (credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss) Back in 2017, astronomers detected a […]
Enlarge (credit: ESO/L. Calçada) Back in 2020, astronomers discovered an unusual star system just 1,000 light years from Earth. However, two different teams disagreed on the nature of the system, which was dubbed HR 6819. One team argued that it was looking at a trinary grouping with two stars orbiting a black hole. The other […]
Enlarge / Artist’s conception of a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) — a star being shredded by the powerful gravity of a supermassive black hole. Material from the star spirals into a disk rotating around the black hole, and a jet of particles is ejected. There are decades of radio astronomy data in the archives of […]
Enlarge / Screengrab of Jesse Woolston’s latest piece, The Dynamics of Flow, debuting at Art Basel Miami Beach later this week. (credit: Jesse Woolston) Multimedia artist, composer, and sound designer Jesse Woolston has had a recurring dream for much of his life about encountering a black hole, “falling inward, and waking up terrified.” (Who wouldn’t wake […]
Enlarge / Highest-resolution image of Centaurus A obtained with the Occasion Horizon Telescope on top of a color composite image of the entire galaxy. (credit: Radboud University/ESO/WFI/MPIfR//APEX/NASA/CXC/CfA/EHT/M. Janssen et al. ) The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration made headlines in 2019 by capturing the very first direct image of a black hole at the center […]
Enlarge (credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)) As we carefully map the stars of our Milky Way, we’re able to identify features that tell us of its history. These include local details, such as the stars that have passed through an area from which something would be able to detect Earth. And it includes far larger structures, […]
The successful gravitational-wave detections just keep coming for the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, which has now confirmed two separate “mixed” mergers between black holes and neutron stars, sending powerful gravitational waves rippling across spacetime. Those signals were detected last year by the collaboration, just 10 days apart. A year and a half later, the events officially constitute […]
Enlarge / Even with today’s real estate boom, a supermassive black hole in the neighborhood has to drive the asking price down a bit, right? (credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) / Redfin / Nathan Mattise) Black holes flood the Universe. The nearest one is a mere 1,500 lightyears away. A giant one, Sagittarius A*, sits in […]