Latest Black holes Stories

New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made a major advance in explaining how a special class of black holes may shut off the high-speed jets they produce. These results suggest that these black holes have a mechanism for regulating the rate at which they grow.Black holes come in many sizes: the supermassive ones, including those in quasars, which weigh in at millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, and the much smaller stellar-mass black holes which have measured...

The rotating black hole has been described as one of nature's most perfect objects.As described by the Kerr solution of Einstein's gravitational field equations, its spacetime geometry is completely characterized by only two numbers "” mass and spin "” and is sometimes described by the aphorism "black holes have no hair.''A particle orbiting a rotating black hole always conserves its energy and angular momentum, but otherwise traces a complicated twisting rosette pattern with no...

A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf...

Cardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on 1 of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicistCardiff University researchers who are part of a British-German team searching the depths of space to study gravitational waves, may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics according to an American physicist.Craig Hogan, a physicist at...

A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf...

Seeing the shape of material around black holes for first timeBlack holes can now be thought of as donut holes. The shape of material around black holes has been seen for the first time: an analysis of over 200 active galactic nuclei"”cores of galaxies powered by disks of hot material feeding a super-massive black hole"”shows that all have a consistent, ordered physical structure that seems to be independent of the black hole's size."This should be a very messy and complicated...

A team of theoretical and experimental physicists, with participants from Case Western Reserve University, have designed a new black hole simulator called BlackMax to search for evidence that extra dimensions might exist in the universe.Information about BlackMax's creation has been published in Physical Review Letters in the article, "BlackMax: A Black-Hole Event Generator with Rotation, Recoil, Split Branes and Brane Tension."Black holes are theorized to be regions in space where...

Renowned cosmologist Stephen Hawking will retire from his prominent Cambridge University position at the end of the academic year in September, but plans to continue his study of space and time, the university said Friday.Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by the distinguished 18th century physicist Isaac Newton. Cambridge University policy requires officeholders to retire at the end of the academic year in which they turn 67 years old, a milestone Hawking will...

Here's what didn't happen on Sept. 10th:The world did not end. Switching on the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, did not trigger the creation of a microscopic black hole. And that black hole did not start rapidly sucking in surrounding matter faster and faster until it devoured the Earth, as sensationalist news reports had suggested it might.Of course, because you're alive and reading this article today, you already knew that. Currently the...

XMM-Newton has uncovered a well-tuned periodic signal from a super-massive black hole lodged at the centre of a galaxy, ending a long quest for such an object. The discovery provides scientists with a clearer picture on black hole accretion processes and an excellent tool to study active galactic nuclei (AGNs).These periodic signals originating from the black hole are emitted in X-rays, which are blocked out by the Earth's atmosphere. So the team used data from ESA's orbiting X-ray...