black

Supercomputers Simulated a Black Hole And Found Something We’ve Never Seen Before

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While black holes might always be black, they do occasionally emit some intense bursts of light from just outside their event horizon. Previously, what exactly caused these flares had been a mystery to science.    That mystery was solved recently by a team of researchers that used a series of supercomputers to model the details of black holes‘ magnetic … Read more

We Have The First Direct Evidence of a White Dwarf Violently Ripping Apart a Planet

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Black holes may be well known for their gluttonous tendencies, but they’re not the only dead stars capable of slurping down passing objects. For years, evidence has been mounting that white dwarf stars also have a penchant for snacking – and on their own planets, no less.   Now, for the first time, astronomers have … Read more

Major African Radio Telescope Will Help to Image Black Holes

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Astronomers across Africa and Europe have reacted with delight to news that Africa’s first millimetre-range radio telescope is to be built. The Africa Millimetre Telescope will fill a gap in the coverage of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of telescopes that can receive and analyse radio waves of around 1 millimetre in … Read more

What happens at the center of a black hole?

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Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. Sutter contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. The singularity at the center of a black hole is the ultimate no man’s land: … Read more

Paint it black: behind the James Webb Space Telescope’s signature color

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NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has to stay super cool to observe the cosmos. How does it beat the heat? Black paint.  As the agency explained in its new YouTube series “Elements of Webb,” the James Webb Space Telescope‘s radiator is painted black to absorb heat. Just like how black asphalt gets hot in the … Read more

For The First Time, a Lone Black Hole Has Been Found Wandering The Milky Way

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Like an ancient cardigan, the Milky Way should be absolutely riddled with black holes. According to our best estimates, there should be as many as 10 million to 1 billion stellar-mass black holes out there, drifting peacefully and quietly through the galaxy. There’s just one problem when it comes to counting them: Unless they manage … Read more

Meta: Rogue black hole: First truly isolated stellar-mass black hole found

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Rogue black holes are usually detected by the matter falling into them, but the first truly isolated black hole has been found because of the way it bends the light of a distant star Space 3 February 2022 By Alex Wilkins Artist’s illustration of a rogue black hole Shutterstock/Vadim Sadovski An isolated stellar-mass black hole … Read more

Breathtaking New Chandra Pics Show Cosmic Objects Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before

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Human vision may be limited to a specific range of wavelengths, but that doesn’t mean we’ll never understand the full complexity of light in our Universe. Instruments can peer into the cosmos in regimes that are otherwise invisible to our eyes, showing us not just the dynamics of the stars, but their absolutely awe-inspiring beauty. … Read more