Stephen Hawking: There May Be a Way Out of a Black Hole
Yesterday, renowned physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, speaking to attendees of a conference being held at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, proposed a new idea that addresses a forty-year old cosmological mystery called the Black Hole Information Paradox. Simply put, the basis for the paradox is the conflict between quantum mechanics and the theory […]
Universe Dying?; Seals Use Voice Recognition; Bacteria Helps Smokers Quit
Astronomers Say our Universe is Dying Is our universe slowly dying? An international group of astronomers, who studied more than 200,000 galaxies and precisely measured the energy produced within a large portion of the cosmos, have confirmed that a section of the Universe is generating about half as much energy as it did two billion […]
Slumbering Giant Black Hole Awakes After 26 Years
Some 8,000 light years from Earth, in the constellation Cygnus, a binary system known as V404 Cygni has come to life for the first time in 26 years. While most binary systems consist of two stars orbiting a common center of mass, V404 Cygni is made up of a black hole and a star that […]
The Best Science Images – February 2015
NASA’s NuStar Mission Finds Rare Pulsar that Pumps Out the Energy of 10 Million Suns
This animation shows a neutron star—the core of a star that exploded in a massive supernova. This particular neutron star is known as a pulsar because it sends out rotating beams of X-rays that sweep past Earth like lighthouse beacons. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission recently made a remarkable discovery that could […]
Rhythmic Light Pulses Help Astronomers Accurately Measure Medium Sized Black Hole
Astronomers have calculated that there may be about 100 million black holes in the galaxy. And they mostly fall into two sizes… stellar and supermassive. The size difference has to do with how much mass they contain versus that of our own sun or solar mass. For some time now, astronomers have also theorized that […]
Milky Way Might Have Formed From Inside-Out
The Milky Way Galaxy may have formed from the inside-out, according to data from the Gaia-ESO Survey. Using data gathered by the ESO’s 8-meter Very Large Telescope (VLT), located in Chile’s Atacama desert, astronomers were able to make their findings by tracking and studying the amounts of elements, such as magnesium, within the chemical composition of stars […]
Flash Could Allow Scientists to Witness Birth of a Black Hole
A cosmic flash generated by a dying star might allow scientists to see something they’ve never witnessed before – the birth of a black hole. A black hole is a celestial object that is so dense not even light can escape its intense gravitational pull. This phenomenon occurs when a dying star runs out of […]
Scientists Discover Universe’s Largest Known Structure
Scientists have found the largest known structure in the universe, a cluster of galactic cores so vast it would take four billion years for a spacecraft traveling at the speed of light to cross it. The sighting challenges a theory from Einstein which suggests such a massive object shouldn’t exist in the universe. A quasar […]
Mystery Properties of Black Holes Revealed
Of all the celestial objects that make up the Universe, nothing is more mysterious than the black hole. Now Denmark scientists have come up with what they say are groundbreaking theories that explain several properties of the enigmatic black hole. The scientists’ research indicates black holes have properties similar to the dynamics of both solids and […]