Maybe We Don’t Hear From Aliens Because They Choose To Go Silent

Artist impression of an alien civilization. Image credit: CfA

How will humanity meet its end?

That’s only a depressing question if you think that humanity will go on forever. Alas, nothing lasts forever, and if something could last forever, it probably wouldn’t be our struggling primate species.

But we’ll likely be around for a while yet, pondering things as we do. One of the things we love to ponder is: why don’t we hear from any other alien civilizations?

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Can We Now Predict When A Neutron Star Will Give Birth To A Black Hole?

A black hole is the final form a massive star collapses to. The light (and spacetime itself) is warped around the black hole's event horizon due to extreme gravitational effects. This is as accurate as we can be to visualizing an actual black hole as it was generated with a code that implemented General Relativity accurately. Credit and Copyright: Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros. Mathematical Model used to create the image developed by Dr. Kip Thorne

A neutron star is perhaps one of the most awe-inspiring and mysterious things in the Universe. Composed almost entirely of neutrons with no net electrical charge, they are the final phase in the life-cycle of a giant star, born of the fiery explosions known as supernovae. They are also the densest known objects in the universe, a fact which often results in them becoming a black hole if they undergo a change in mass.

For some time, astronomers have been confounded by this process, never knowing where or when a neutron star might make this final transformation. But thanks to a recent study by a team of researchers from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, it may now be possible to determine the absolute maximum mass that is required for a neutron star to collapse, giving birth to a new black hole.

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