Light famously cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole, leaving astrophysicists to theorize and speculate what it’s like beyond the limits of human perception. Now, NASA researchers take that theorization a step further, in the form of an animation that takes you (the viewer) into the black hole.
A leading gravitational wave observatory recently detected ripples in spacetime that scientists say came from the collision of a dead, superdense stellar remnant and an unknown object.
The dense remains of massive stars generate powerful jets of gas and dust that move hundreds of millions of miles per hour, according to research published last week
A new image of our galaxy’s central black hole reveals the magnetic field surrounding the object in polarized light. The image reveals how gas and superheated matter in the immediate vicinity of the black hole move around it. But aside from that, it’s a great way to visualize the extreme physics happening at the…
If you asked an astrophysicist what is yet to be discovered in the universe, there’s a good chance they’d paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: It’s full of known unknowns.
Black holes. Despite their names, the enigmatic objects are opposite of vacuous. They are some of the universe’s densest objects, with masses ranging from the size of stars to several hundred million stars. Their gravitational fields are so intense that not even light can escape them at a certain point, leaving us…
Stay calm, everybody stay calm. But it’s finally happening: The European Space Agency is committing itself to the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a gravitational wave observatory that will study some of the universe’s most enigmatic phenomena.
A team of scientists found a compact object 40,000 light-years from Earth that is either a very massive neutron star or an itsy-bitsy black hole, but they’re not sure which.
No space-based gravitational wave observatory exists…yet. But that hasn’t stopped a team of astronomers from demonstrating how the gravitational universe might look, using simulated data to create a “synthetic gravitational sky.”
Astronomers transfixed the public in April 2019 when they released the first-ever image of a black hole, produced by radio wave data from a collaboration of telescopes around the world known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope.