We have to start with one of the fundamental questions of the universe: Is our reality the most basic level that exists? To suss that out, we can make analogies to a variety of other things. When you use a computer, you don’t believe what you see on the screen is the fundamental and bottom-most mechanism at play. You know there’s code—several layers in fact, of increasing abstraction—and the code ultimately boils down to electrical pulses.
Some experts use a similar kind of reasoning to plumb the idea that we’re not the bottom of our own reality's stack. Black holes are an exemplar of this thinking, because they don’t act like anything else we’ve ever discovered. And how things fall into black holes has implications for many other questions about the nature of reality.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Hubble Sees Dark Shadows That Could Be Cast by a Supermassive Black Hole - Universe Today
We use the term ‘supermassive black hole’ with a kind of casual familiarity. But stop and think about what they really are: Monstrous, beguiling singularities where the understood laws of physics and cosmology are brought to their knees. A region where gravity is so powerful that it warps everything around it, drawing material in—even light itself—and sometimes spitting out jets of energy at near-light-speed.
It was only recently that we got our first image of one of these monstrosities. Now, the Hubble has captured an image of a supermassive black hole (SMBH), or what might be part of its shadow, anyway.
3 reasons why the scariest things in the universe are black holes | Astronomy.com
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .
Massive shadows from nearby galaxy could be due to black hole dust ring - The Financial Express
Black holes: Sunsets offer some of the most stunning views when the sunlight filters through the clouds and creates a mix of bright and dark rays due to the scattering of light by the atmosphere and the shadows of the clouds. A similar effect was noticed by astronomers who were studying the images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of a nearby galaxy called IC 5063. The images showed narrow bright and dark rays of light emerging from the bright centre of the galaxy.
Centre for Astrophysics' Peter Maksym-led team traced these rays to the core of the galaxy. This is where they found an active supermassive black hole, a dense and compact spatial region which swallows light as well as matter under a massive gravitational pull. The rays are emitted from the black hole, which is feeding on the infalling material and producing the powerful light due to the superheated gas around it.
Other things to check out:
Scientists make sound-waves from a quantum vacuum at the Black Hole laboratory -- ScienceDaily
Researchers have developed a new theory for observing a quantum vacuum that could lead to new insights into the behaviour of black holes.
The Unruh effect combines quantum physics and the theory of relativity. So far it has not been possible to measure or observe it, but now new research from a team led by the University of Nottingham has shed light on how this could be achieved using sound particles. The team's research has been published today in the journal Physical Review Letters .
Final dance of unequal black hole partners | EurekAlert! Science News
VIDEO: An animation of a binary black hole inspiral with a 128:1 mass ration. view more
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Physicists began using supercomputers to obtain solutions to this famously hard problem back in the 1960s. In 2000, with no solutions in sight, Kip Thorne, 2018 Nobel Laureate and one of the designers of LIGO, famously bet that there would be an observation of gravitational waves before a numerical solution was reached.
He lost that bet when, in 2005, Carlos Lousto, then at The University of Texas at Brownsville, and his team generated a solution using the Lonestar supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. (Concurrently, groups at NASA and Caltech derived independent solutions.)
Hubble Spots Shadow of Supermassive Black Hole's Torus in IC 5063 | Astronomy | Sci-News.com
Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed spectacular large-scale dark and light rays beaming out of the bright center of IC 5063 , an active galaxy located 156 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Indus. The researchers think that an inner-tube-shaped ring, or torus, of dusty material surrounding IC 5063's central black hole is casting its shadow into space.
This Hubble image of the nearby active galaxy IC 5063 reveals a mixture of bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core, home of a supermassive black hole. Image credit: Credits: NASA / ESA / Hubble / STScI / W.P. Maksym, CfA.
Supercomputer Simulations Tackle Lopsided Black Hole Mergers
In 2015, after a century of uncertainty, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) first observed gravitational waves from the collision of black holes.
For his new round of simulations, Lousto – a professor of mathematics at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) is simulating black hole mergers with wildly disproportionate size ratios (128:1). Waves from such collisions are not detectable by LIGO, which can only detect waves from collisions between moderately sized black holes of more or less equal sizes.
Happening on Twitter
The MidnightBall set is so dark, your closet will collapse into a Black Hole. https://t.co/NHXpr40JVo Why wait for… https://t.co/mW3A8LzRB6 ArtixKrieger (from Tampa (Secret Underground Lab)) Wed Nov 25 22:44:23 +0000 2020
Astronomers find the biggest black hole ever measured. With a mass of 40 billion suns, the goliath black hole packs… https://t.co/E6ASqBIN7L AstronomyMag (from Our tiny corner of the cosmos) Wed Nov 25 04:00:16 +0000 2020
NASA's Hubble Telescope captures black hole's 'shadow beams' spilling out https://t.co/Hhbsv4yJAg republic (from Mumbai, India) Tue Nov 24 20:37:30 +0000 2020
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