Last year, the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors pinged with an entirely new kind of collision: not two neutron stars, not two black holes , but a neutron star and a black hole together . Scientists were thrilled: this could be the first time we've ever witnessed such a binary system.
Now, after poring over the corner of space in which the collision took place, an international team of astronomers has seen the aftermath - or rather, the lack of one.
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Nothing can escape a black hole...or can it?
If matter echoing from an interaction with a black hole can be proven, it will shake physics like nothing else. Such echoes disrupt the curvature of spacetime that has been created over innumerable years by everything from astral explosions to planets smashing into each other.
"If confirmed, this finding will have significant consequences for both physics of quantum black holes and astrophysics of binary neutron star mergers," he and co-author Jahed Abadi said of the merger, GW170817, adding that it is "the first tentative detection of post-merger gravitational wave "echoes" from a highly spinning "black hole" remnant."
Bad Astronomy | Astronomers find a star dive-bombing our galaxy's supermassive black hole
At the center of our galaxy lies Sgr A* — a supermassive black hole. With over 4 million times the Sun's mass, you can see why it gets that moniker.
One reason we know its mass is that there's a cluster of young, luminous stars orbiting around it. These are called S stars , and they form a group around the black hole about a quarter of a light year across — a few trillion kilometers. One of these stars, S2, has an elliptical orbit that takes it to a distance of just 16 billion kilometers from the black hole as it travels on its elliptical orbit. Until recently, that star had the closest encounter we knew of.
Dr. Katie Bouman to present 'Portrait of a Black Hole' | Campus | purdueexponent.org
Katie Bouman, assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences engineering and applied science at California Institute of Technology
In March, Katie Bouman will be visiting the Purdue Honors College for the third annual Aronson Family Science and Society Honors Lecture, according to a Purdue News Service release.
"Dr. Bouman's work is emblematic of the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that leads to thriving innovation and the approach to learning we offer in the Honors College," said Rhonda Phillips, dean of the Honors College, per the release. "We're thrilled to host her visit to campus, and look forward to the insights she will bring to campus and the community."
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Sunday Space: An image of a black hole stunned the world, but how it was taken is just as
On April 10, 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope project released an image that to this point had been believed to be impossible: we had captured an image of a black hole.
This image flooded the news and social media, and despite some criticising the so called "blurriness" of the image, many were in awe of this image of an object that captures so many of our imaginations. But just what is this object, and how did we manage to pull off this stunt?
The black hole in question lies at the centre of a supergiant galaxy known as Messier 87 (or M87), one of the largest galaxies in the observable universe.
Black hole shock: Anomaly 'larger than a city' spiralling through Atlantic Ocean revealed |
The series said last month: “You might not need to fly to space if you want to take a closer look at a black hole.
“Scientists have found something very similar to black holes in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
“A black hole has such an enormous gravitational pull that once something gets pulled in, it doesn’t have any chance to escape.
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“Even light can’t get out of a black hole and ocean black holes seem to be as powerful as their space relatives.
Black hole echoes might force scientists to rethink the laws of physics
Black holes continue to be some of the most mysterious objects in space. But when it comes to one of the enigmas they've presented to the scientific community, findings from a recent study may have offered a few answers. It all lies within the strange "echoes" in spacetime black holes reportedly give off , which could end up spiraling off into an entirely new branch of physics, if scientists can ever research said echoes properly.
The new study, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics , posits that these echoes in spacetime, if they are indeed real, would be the result of interactions between matter and black holes. They could help scientists determine whether the matter that ends up "sucked into" black holes is actually gone forever, or if it's simply coming out somewhere else.
Stephen Hawking's Quantum Black Hole Hypothesis Supported by Gravitational Wave Echoes
Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of space-time, caused by the collision of massive, compact objects in space, such as black holes or neutron stars.
“According to Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, nothing can escape from the gravity of a black hole once it has passed a point of no return, known as the event horizon,” explained Niayesh Afshordi, a physics and astronomy professor at Waterloo. “This was scientists’ understanding for a long time until Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to predict that quantum particles will slowly leak out of black holes, which we now call Hawking radiation.
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