Our episode on black holes generated many many questions from listeners. We dip into this bottomless pool of questions and start dealing with them. Are really big black holes like the Big Bang? How can black holes evaporate? What would it look like to stand on a black hole? And just how large would a rock have to be before its gravity is so strong that a human can’t escape?
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All Was Quiet in the Galactic Centre
For a brief time in April 2006, the active region surrounding the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way settled down. Ten different sources of high energy rays all faded away temporarily, and ESA’s Integral probe was able to capture images of less bright regions, which weren’t completely obscured by the bright objects in their vicinity.
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Light Echoes from Our Supermassive Black Hole
A new set of images from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory show the reflected X-ray emission from a small meal consumed by the supermassive black hole that lurks at the heart of the Milky Way.
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First Triple Quasar Discovered
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe, beaming radiation across billions of light-years of space. Although they were a mystery for many years, astronomers now believe they’re the bright radiation from matter clogging up around an actively feeding supermassive black hole.
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Even Dwarf Galaxies Have Supermassive Black Holes
To form a supermassive black hole, you’d think it takes a really large galaxy, like the Milky Way or Andromeda. But it appears that these monsters can form at the heart of plain old dwarf galaxies too.
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Podcast: Black Holes Big and Small
We’re finally ready to deal with the topic you’ve all been waiting for: Schwarzschild swirlers, Chandrasekhar crushers, ol’ matter manglers, sucking singularities… you might know them as blackholes. Join as as we examine how black holes form, what they consume, and just how massive they can get.
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Black Hole Found in a Globular Star Cluster
Stellar mass black holes have been discovered, and astronomers now believe that supermassive black holes exist at the centres of most galaxies. But now a black hole has been discovered inside a globular star cluster. This could be one of the elusive “intermediate-mass” black holes.
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Here’s a New Way to Explode: Hybrid Gamma-Ray Burst
Just when you thought you’d figured out all the ways to blow up, nature reveals a new way. This latest class of explosion is called a hybrid gamma-ray burst, and it was discovered by NASA’s Swift satellite. As with most gamma-ray bursts, this explosion probably indicates the birth of a new black hole in the Universe; however, the explosion itself was different from what astronomers have seen before.
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Large and Small, Black Holes Feed the Same Way
Whether you’re dealing with a stellar mass black hole, or a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy, it appears they consume matter in much the same way. It’s all just an issue of scale. Researchers have studied the accretion disks around both stellar and supermassive black holes, and found they seem to emit the same pattern of X-rays. Because of their size, the supermassive variety consume matter over long periods. By studying the smaller variety, researchers can model what will happen on larger scales.
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Black Hole Erupts on Camera
ESA’s Integral space observatory has spotted a blast of gamma rays from a suspected black hole in the Milky Way. the outburst occurred on September 17, 2006, and gradually built in brightness over the course of a few days before declining again. It’s this rise and fall of brightness, called a light curve, that allowed astronomers identify the source as a black hole. It’s likely that a disk of gas and material orbiting the black hole became unstable, and a portion of it collapsed, creating the outburst.
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