Ripples in space itself have revealed a merger of a large black hole with an object thought to be too small to be a black hole.
Gravitational wave detectors have spotted a cosmic collision in which a giant black hole swallowed up a mystery object seemingly too heavy to be a neutron star, but too light to be a black hole. Weighing in at 2.6 times the mass of the Sun, the object falls into a hypothetical "mass gap," a desert between the heaviest neutron star and the lightest black hole that some theories predict—suggesting the gap doesn't exist and that those theories need to be amended.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Rogue 'Missing Link' Black Holes Could Be Zooming Around The Universe as We Speak
Throughout the Universe, there are numerous examples of galaxies coming together in colossal mergers, a billion-year process that smears stars and gas across the surrounding space. For the most part, we know how this plays out - but we don't quite know what happens to the supermassive black holes within their galactic centres.
Astronomers think these two galactic cores could merge into one larger black hole, sending huge gravitational waves rippling out across spacetime. But if there's any asymmetry in the galactic merger, the newly forged black hole could be punted clean out of the galaxy and sent zooming across the Universe by gravitational wave recoil , taking a swarm of stars with it.
After 50 Years, Experiment Finally Shows Energy Could Be Extracted From a Black Hole
A 50-year-old theoretical process for extracting energy from a rotating black hole finally has experimental verification.
Using an analogue of the components required, physicists have shown that the Penrose process is indeed a plausible mechanism to slurp out some of that rotational energy - if we could ever develop the means.
That's not likely, but the work does show that peculiar theoretical ideas can be brilliantly used to explore the physical properties of some of the most extreme objects in the Universe.
Monster Black Hole Found in the Early Universe
Pōniuāʻena, the second most distant quasar ever discovered. Astronomers discovered this, the second most distant quasar ever found, using the international Gemini Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), Programs of NSF's NOIRLab. It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name.
Newswise — After more than a decade of searching for the first quasars, a team of astronomers used the NOIRLab’s Gemini Observatory and CTIO to discover the most massive quasar known in the early Universe — detected from a time only 700 million years after the Big Bang [1] .
Quite a lot has been going on:
Researchers verify 'extremely odd' black hole physics - BBC Science Focus Magazine
A team of researchers claim to have verified a decades-old theory that energy can be created by black holes.
Scientists at the University of Glasgow's School of Physics and Astronomy set out to validate Roger Penrose's 1969 work. They used sound waves in an attempt to endorse the "extremely odd physics a half-century after the theory was first proposed".
British physicist Penrose theorised that energy could be created by dropping objects such as a rocket into a black hole and splitting the object in two. One half escapes from the black hole, while the other falls past the point of no return (the 'event horizon').
Black Hole News - How Aliens Could Use Black Holes to Make Energy
The idea is simple ... by quantum and black hole standards, at least. In the mouth of a black hole, the combination of infinite density and strangeness inside the black hole and the rapidly rotating outer ergosphere would make the dangling object travel faster than light in order.
Think of how a needle stays poised on the surface of a spinning vinyl record: the record is spinning rapidly while the needle stands still. In 1969, physicist Roger Penrose developed this theory and hypothesized that the object would have “negative energy.”
ESA listens in on black hole mission
The Spektr-RG astrophysical observatory was developed by Roscosmos with participation from Germany led by the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and is currently operating in a halo orbit around a special point in space called the L2 Lagrange point, some 1.5 million km from Earth. From here, its goal is to map the entire sky in X-rays and identify new X-ray sources, such as supermassive black holes, across the Universe.
This spring, the Russian ground stations normally used to communicate with Spektr-RG were in unfavourable geographic positions, and experts from ESA's Estrack ground station network stepped in, working in close cooperation with colleagues at the Russian Complex for Receiving Scientific Information (RKPNI).
Black hole bombshell: 50-year-old theory PROVES how aliens could exploit a black hole | Science |
Professor Penrose predicted the object would acquire a negative energy in this extreme region of space.
By dropping the object and splitting it in two so that one half falls into the black hole while the other is recovered, the recovered half would gain energy extracted from the black hole's rotation.
However, the sheer scale of the engineering challenge the acclaimed physicist suggested only a very advanced, perhaps alien, race could achieve the task.
Happening on Twitter
A mysterious astronomical object merged with a black hole 780 million light-years away and created gravitational wa… https://t.co/DQajV5EGPp CNN Wed Jun 24 06:11:33 +0000 2020
Scientists have discovered the heaviest known neutron star, or maybe the lightest known black hole: "Either way it… https://t.co/Umzkhrgg1M nytimes (from New York City) Wed Jun 24 18:40:07 +0000 2020
A new gravitational wave discovery has upended what astronomers thought they knew about black holes and neutron sta… https://t.co/k0NQHxOS9Y ScienceNews (from Washington, DC) Tue Jun 23 23:04:46 +0000 2020
When black holes collide, they typically create gravitational waves that can be detected on Earth, but not light.… https://t.co/bpLVE0d05Z cnni (from Everywhere) Thu Jun 25 15:40:04 +0000 2020
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