For decades, astronomers have had their earthly eyes on the adventures of a star known as S2 that tickles the edges of oblivion.
Every 16 years, the star's orbit takes it within a cosmic whisker's breadth — 11 billion miles — of the lip of what is believed to be the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* , the pothole in eternity at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. That black hole has consumed mass equivalent to four million suns. During its fraught passages, the S2 star experiences the full strangeness of the universe, according to Einstein.
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In a photo of a black hole, a possible key to mysteries – Harvard Gazette
Black holes cast a shadow on the glow of surrounding material because their strong gravitational field can bend and trap light. The ring is actually not a single ring but a stack of increasingly sharp subrings. This image is from the study, "Universal interferometric signatures of a black hole's photon ring."
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Billions of people worldwide marveled at the first image ever captured of a black hole. The photo of the glowing, blurry doughnut, taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team, showed the massive dark region, a monster the size of our solar system, that, like its peers , gobbles up everything — even light — that ventures too close.
Blowtorch of the Gods Captured by Black Hole Image Makers - The New York Times
Astronomers said Tuesday that they had for the first time seen a black hole spitting fire from the heart of a distant quasar. The work, by the same team that produced the first image of a black hole last year, illuminates the workings of one of the mysterious fountains of energy that dot deepest space and have tantalized astronomers with their ferocious energies ever since they were discovered more than 50 years ago.
Resolved in stunning detail from a distance of five billion light-years, this blowtorch of the gods appears as a bent flame 60 light-years long, shooting downward in the movie above from a bright central blob of unholy energy that might be the black hole itself.
The Team Behind First Black Hole Photo Plans to Make a Video | Digital Trends
Last year, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project made history by achieving something that was thought to be impossible: It captured an image of a black hole .
That was the culmination of the EHT project and also its biggest achievement to date, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the project.
In a virtual conference with reporters last week, the EHT researchers talked about what’s next for the project and how current global conditions are affecting their work.
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Light Behaves Really Strangely Around a Black Hole - Universe Today
Black holes are famous for being inescapable. Within the event horizon of these celestial objects, matter and even light enter and then disappear forever. However, beyond the event horizon, black holes are known to form accretion disks from which light can escape. In fact, this is how astronomers are able to confirm the presence of black holes and determine their properties (i.e. mass, spin rate, etc.)
However, according to a recent NASA-funded study led by researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), there is evidence that not all light emanating from a black hole's disk simply escapes. According to their observations, some of the light escaping from the disk is pulled back in by the black hole's gravity and reflected off the disk again. These observations confirm something astronomers have theorized for about forty years.
Astronomers spot quasar with the most powerful winds ever seen | Space
Scientists took a second look at a strange object and spotted the most powerful winds ever detected gusting off of a special flavor of black hole called a quasar.
A quasar forms when a supermassive black hole accelerates certain particles it cannot absorb so dramatically that they reach nearly the speed of light as they shoot away from the black hole in bright, jetlike structures. Quasars often also produce winds that can gust through the surrounding galaxy, reducing star formation . But, until now, scientists haven't ever seen such powerful quasar winds.
A Black Hole's Energy Beam is Seemingly Breaking the Laws of Physics - VICE
One of the fundamental quirks of our universe is that nothing inside of it can be "superluminal," or faster than the speed of light. That's one reason why an explosive jet fueled by the supermassive black hole of a faraway galaxy that appears to be traveling at up to 20 times light speed has caught the eye of scientists.
New observations of this optical illusion are also "the sharpest-ever images" of a jet powered by a supermassive black hole, according to a study published on Tuesday in Astronomy & Astrophysics . Understanding how these jets are formed is "one of the major quests in modern astrophysics," said the authors, who were led by Jae-Young Kim, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy.
Gravitational waves reveal unprecedented collision of heavy and light black holes | Science | AAAS
The gravitational waves from a black-hole merger typically ripple at twice the frequency that the black holes go around each other.
Researchers with the world's gravitational wave detectors said today they had picked up vibrations from a cosmic collision that harmonized with the opening notes of an Elvis Presley hit. The source was the most exotic merger of two black holes detected yet—a pair in which one weighed more than three times as much as the other. Because of the stark mass imbalance, the collision generated gravitational waves at multiple frequencies, in a harmony Elvis fans would recognize.
Happening on Twitter
For the first time, astronomers have observed a star orbiting the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milk… https://t.co/3qDxrSXRWp CNN Sun Apr 19 01:40:04 +0000 2020
The discovery of a star 'dancing' around a black hole in the Milky Way backs up what Einstein predicted over a cent… https://t.co/YC6bsmI4hw Reuters (from Around the world) Fri Apr 17 16:05:00 +0000 2020
Chile's astronomers discovered a star 'dancing' around a black hole in the Milky Way just as Albert Einstein might… https://t.co/Hjv8u5MN1E Reuters (from Around the world) Fri Apr 17 20:00:00 +0000 2020
A star dancing around the supermassive black hole in the heart of the Milky Way confirms Einstein was right, again… https://t.co/Keg3lFUUAq CBSNews (from New York, NY) Sat Apr 18 13:00:02 +0000 2020
