Space and astronomy news
Supermassive Black Holes are Nature’s confounding behemoths. It’s difficult for Earth-bound minds to comprehend their magnitude and power. Astrophysicists have spent decades studying them, and they’ve made progress. But one problem still baffles even them: the Final Parsec Problem.
New research might have solved the problem, and dark matter plays a role in the solution.
Continue reading “A Solution to the “Final Parsec Problem?””
What is Dark Matter? That question is prominent in discussions about the nature of the Universe. There are many proposed explanations for dark matter, both within the Standard Model and outside of it.
One proposed component of dark matter is primordial black holes, created in the early Universe without a collapsing star as a progenitor.
Continue reading “Primordial Black Holes Can Only Explain a Fraction of Dark Matter”
Nothing lasts forever, including black holes. Over immensely long periods of time, they evaporate, as will other large objects in the Universe. This is because of Hawking Radiation, named after Stephen Hawking, who developed the idea in the 1970s.
The problem is Hawking Radiation has never been reliably observed.
Continue reading “Merging Black Holes Could Give Astronomers a Way to Detect Hawking Radiation”
Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been hungering for better detectors. But the Earth is warm and seismically noisy, and that will always limit the effectiveness of Earth-based detectors.
Continue reading “Here’s Why We Should Put a Gravitational Wave Observatory on the Moon”
The Universe is filled with supermassive black holes. Almost every galaxy in the cosmos has one, and they are the most well-studied black holes by astronomers. But one thing we still don’t understand is just how they grew so massive so quickly. To answer that, astronomers have to identify lots of black holes in the early Universe, and since they are typically found in merging galaxies, that means astronomers have to identify early galaxies accurately. By hand. But thanks to the power of machine learning, that’s changing.
Continue reading “Black Holes Need Refreshing Cold Gas to Keep Growing”
Humans are born wonderers. We’re always wondering about the next valley over, the next horizon, what we’ll understand next about this vast Universe that we’re all wrapped up in.
In 2015, we finally detected our first long-awaited and long-theorized gravitational wave from the distant merger of two stellar mass black holes. But now we want to know more, and only better detectors can feed our appetite.
Continue reading “Next Generation Gravitational Wave Observatories Could Detect 100-600 Solar Mass Black Hole Mergers”
Black holes are the most massive objects that we know of in the Universe. Not stellar mass black holes, not supermassive black holes (SMBHs,) but ultra-massive black holes (UMBHs.) UMBHs sit in the center of galaxies like SMBHs, but they have more than five billion solar masses, an astonishingly large amount of mass. The largest black hole we know of is Phoenix A, a UMBH with up to 100 billion solar masses.
How can something grow so massive?
Continue reading “Ultra-Massive Black Holes: How Does the Universe Produce Objects So Massive?”
Ever since astronomers first detected ultra high energy neutrinos coming from random directions in space, they have not been able to figure out what generates them. But a new hypothesis suggests an unlikely source: the mergers of black holes.
Continue reading “When Black Holes Collide They Also Produce Neutrinos”
In February 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced the first-ever detection of gravitational waves (GWs). Originally predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, these waves are ripples in spacetime that occur whenever massive objects (like black holes and neutron stars) merge. Since then, countless GW events have been detected by observatories across the globe – to the point where they have become an almost daily occurrence. This has allowed astronomers to gain insight into some of the most extreme objects in the Universe.
In a recent study, an international team of researchers led by Cardiff University observed a binary black hole system originally detected in 2020 by the Advanced LIGO, Virgo, and Kamioki Gravitational Wave Observatory (KAGRA). In the process, the team noticed a peculiar twisting motion (aka. a precession) in the orbits of the two colliding black holes that was 10 billion times faster than what was noted with other precessing objects. This is the first time a precession has been observed with binary black holes, which confirms yet another phenomenon predicted by General Relativity (GR).
Continue reading “Shortly Before They Collided, two Black Holes Tangled Spacetime up Into Knots”
Until recently, one of the closest orbiting each other pairs of supermassive blackholes was found in NGC 7727. That pair is about 89 million light-years away from Earth. Those black holes are only 1,600 light-years apart from each other. Another pair in OJ 287, about 3.5 billion light-years from Earth, are only separated by about 0.3 light years. Now scientists have discovered a pair orbiting each other at a distance of 200 AU to 2,000 AU apart, about 0.003 to 0.03 light years.
Continue reading “Astronomers Discover two Supermassive Black Holes Orbiting Each Other, Doomed to Collide in the Future.”