News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
What happens to information after it has passed beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There have been suggestions that the geometry of wormholes might help us solve this vexing problem – but the math has been tricky, to say the least. In a new paper, an international team of physicists has found … Read more
Take three black holes and throw them into the disk surrounding a supermassive black hole and things get really weird, really fast.
Two giant bubbles of gamma rays and X-rays that erupted from the center of the Milky Way may stem from a supermassive black hole‘s feeding frenzy at the heart of the galaxy, a new study finds. Recently, the X-ray telescope eROSITA onboard the Spektr-RG space observatory discovered a pair of gigantic X-ray-emitting bubbles, each about … Read more
Since its launch in 2020, a pioneering energy company called Quaise has attracted some serious attention for its audacious goal of diving further into Earth’s crust than anybody has dug before. Following the closure of first round venture capital funding, the MIT spin-off has now raised a total of US$63 million: a respectable start … Read more
Fluctuating light from a black hole, observed over 15 years, has revealed more about the way these enigmatic objects feed. First, a structure called a corona forms around the outside of the event horizon. Then, powerful jets of plasma launch from the poles, punching material from the corona out into interstellar space at speeds close … Read more
Two sets of giant bubbles that extend thousands of light-years above and below the plane of the Milky Way could have been produced by the same event, in spite of their significant difference in size. They’re called the Fermi bubbles and the eROSITA bubbles, and astronomers believe they were the result of activity by … 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
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