The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the Milky Way, but a newly spotted object takes the crown for the most massive stellar black hole known in our galaxy, weighing in at an impressive 33 times the mass of our Sun.
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.
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.
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.”
A rapidly spinning dead star’s wacky fluctuations in brightness are due to the extreme environment surrounding the object, according to a team of astronomers who observed it.
