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A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 375, Issue 6584. This story is part of a special package being published this week about the barriers Black physicists face and potential models for change. Read more C. Smith/Science Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the United States have had outsize success in launching … Read more
This story is part of a special package being published this week about the barriers Black physicists face and potential models for change. Read more For years, Maritza Tavarez-Brown couldn’t talk about the end of her astronomy career without tears. She’d wanted to be an astronomer since high school. But she struggled in her introductory … Read more
A German-built space telescope making the largest ever map of black holes in the universe has been switched off after Germany halted all science cooperation with Russia to protest that country’s invasion of Ukraine. The black hole-hunting telescope, called eROSITA, launched in 2019 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan aboard the Russian-built Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma satellite. The … Read more
Two years ago, astronomers thought they had seen signs of a black hole 1000 light years from Earth – but it turns out to be a star being consumed by its neighbour Space 2 March 2022 By Alex Wilkins An artist’s impression of the binary star system HR 6819 ESO/L. Calçada Strange signals coming from … Read more
In 2020, a team of astronomers with the European Southern Observatory (ESO) discovered the closest black hole to Earth in the HR 6819 system, just 1,000 light-years away, only to have other scientists dispute the findings. As it turns out, those critics seem to have been correct. In new research, an international team of scientists … Read more
Two huge black holes are locked together by gravity as they inevitably spiral towards a collision, researchers have found in a new study. Researchers in a new study have spotted two supermassive black holes that whip around each other every two Earth years, on average, with respective masses each of hundreds of millions of times … Read more
What astronomers had concluded to be a black hole a mere 1,120 light-years from Earth instead appears to be something quite different: a two-star system where one of the stars is sucking the life out of the other. Far from disappointing, though, the conclusion gives astronomers an exciting opportunity to explore how these ‘vampiric’ stars … Read more
This story is part of a special package being published this week about the barriers Black physicists face and potential models for change. Read more C. Smith/Science Apriel Hodari has spent many years studying how to improve training and reduce inequity in the scientific workforce. That research has brought her face to face with “the … Read more
This story is part of a special package about the barriers Black physicists face and potential models for change. Read more C. Smith/Science In the 1990s, physics departments at U.S. universities faced an existential crisis. The number of undergraduate physics majors had plummeted by 25% over 10 years, prompting fears that many departments might disappear … Read more
A strange X-ray glow seen in the sky three and a half years after an epic collision between two neutron stars is a first for science. According to astronomers studying the region of space, it could be the afterglow of the kilonova explosion that was generated by the merger, likely produced by a shock wave … Read more