Black holes are the last things you'd ever expect to have a heart, since they mercilessly devour everything that crosses the event horizon and smash it beyond recognition with crushing gravitational force, but it turns out they can have a heartbeat.
Just 15,000 light years away (which is nothing in cosmic terms), microquasar SS 433 has a "heartbeat" that is somehow synced with a mysterious gas cloud in the Aquila constellation. An international team of astronomers has just discovered this strange phenomenon for the first time. Quasars are binary systems consisting of a black hole and a companion star orbiting each other.
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What Would Happen if You Fell Into a Black Hole? | Astronomy.com
Sorry, science fiction fans. You can’t actually survive a trip through a black hole. And if you tried to take a plunge into one, like Matthew McConaughey in the movie Interstellar , you’d be ripped apart long before you could find out what’s on the other side.
To fully appreciate why you can’t just swan dive or pilot your spaceship into a black hole, you must first understand the basic properties of these gravitational goliaths. Simply put, a black hole is a place where gravity is so strong that no light — or anything else, for that matter — can escape.
Black Hole Fails to Do Its Job, Unleashing a Remarkable Torrent of Star Formation
Galaxy clusters contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies pervaded by hot, X-ray emitting gas that outweighs the combined mass of all the galaxies. Ejections of material powered by a supermassive black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy usually prevent this hot gas from cooling to form vast numbers of stars. This heating allows supermassive black holes to influence or control the activity and evolution of their host cluster.
But what happens if that black hole stops being active? The galaxy cluster SpARCS104922.6+564032.5 (SpARCS1049 for short) located 9.9 billion light-years away from Earth is supplying one answer.
Spinning black hole powers jet by magnetic flux
In quasar 3C279—also a black hole—the EHT team found another phenomenon: At a distance of more than a thousand times the shadow of the black hole, the core of a plasma jet suddenly lit up. How the energy for this jet could get there as if through an invisible chimney was not yet known.
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This quasar has now been observed with the NASA space telescope Fermi-LAT by the astrophysicist Amit Shukla, who until 2018 did research at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany. He now is working at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore. Shukla discovered that the core of the jet, which was found in the millimeter wavelength range, also emits high-energy gamma radiation , but with an extremely flickering brightness.
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When a black hole doesn't swallow everything up, something remarkable happens — study
Black holes are known for being cosmically ruthless . These objects of compact mass swallow up surrounding material, and not even light can escape their strong gravitational pull.
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Astronomers have recently observed a rather passive black hole, one that does not affect its surroundings in a distant galaxy cluster. Rather than swallowing up material itself, the black hole's inactivity allowed for surrounding star formation to flourish.
Could Planet 9 be a primordial black hole?
"Our work started when James and his wife Laura went to the Chicago planetarium and saw a short documentary about Planet 9," Jakub Scholtz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "It must have captured James' attention, because he called me the next day and we started figuring out whether there is any other object that could be out there mimicking a planet.
A few months after they started exploring hypotheses about the nature of Planet 9, another research team at the University of Tokyo reanalyzed data collected as part of the OGLE experiment . OGLE is a research project carried out at the University of Warsaw that entailed capturing images of the sky using advanced telescopes over long periods of time.
A black hole circling a wormhole would emit weird gravitational waves | Science News
Gravitational wave detectors have already spotted mysterious black holes. But something even stranger might be next: wormholes.
Wormholes are hypothetical objects in which spacetime is curved into a tunnel that connects distant cosmic locales or potentially different universes ( SN: 8/5/13 ). From the outside, wormholes can appear similar to black holes. But while an object that falls into a black hole is trapped there, something that falls into a wormhole could traverse through it to the other side.
Planet X? Why not a tiny black hole instead? | Ars Technica
Planet X has a long and storied history of non-existence. For about 130 years, astronomers have debated the existence of an additional planet or planets to explain discrepancies in the orbits of the known planets (mainly Neptune and Uranus). Later, the list of discrepancies was expanded to cover trans-Neptunian objects. But none of the Planet X candidates discovered, including Pluto, have the mass or location to explain observations.
Primordial black holes have now been proposed as the latest planet X (or planet 9, since Pluto was demoted).
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