The dozens of black hole collisions observed by the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors are changing our view of the universe.
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When the first black hole collision was detected in 2015, it was a watershed moment in the history of astronomy. With gravitational waves, astronomers were observing the universe in an entirely new way. But this first event didn't revolutionize our understanding of black holes — nor could it. This collision would be the first of many, astronomers knew, and only with that bounty would answers come.
While you're here, how about this:
Stephen Hawking's 50-year-old puzzle tipped to be solved with black hole discovery | Science
The University of Toronto’s Professor Stefanos Aretakis previously suggested that some black holes could have instabilities on their event horizons.
These instabilities would effectively give some regions of a black hole’s horizon a stronger gravitational pull than others, making them distinguishable.
His equations showed that this was only possible for extremal black holes – a theoretical charged rotating phenomenon with a minimal mass that has never been observed in nature.
What a distant quasar and a 'young' black hole could reveal about the universe
PHOENIX – A team led by University of Arizona astronomers has discovered the most distant quasar found to date. Researchers hope the quasar, which is more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, will provide answers to how galaxies formed after the big bang.
"It was a relief to find," said Feige Wang , lead author of the quasar's research paper and Hubble Fellow at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory . "We have been searching for this quasar for almost five years. We knew it was there somewhere."
Hubble Uncovers Concentration of Small Black Holes | NASA
Not to change the topic here:
Missing: One black hole with 10 billion solar masses - Baltimore Sun
Astronomers are searching the cosmic lost-and-found for one of the biggest, baddest black holes thought to exist. So far they haven't found it.
In the past few decades, it has become part of astronomical lore that at the center of every galaxy lurks a giant black hole into which the equivalent of millions or even billions of suns have disappeared. The bigger the galaxy, the more massive the black hole at its center.
So it was a surprise a decade ago when Marc Postman, of the Space Telescope Science Institute, using the Hubble Space Telescope to survey clusters of galaxies, found a supergiant galaxy with no sign of a black hole in its center. Normally, the galaxy's core would have a kink of extra light in its center, a kind of sparkling cloak, produced by stars that had been gathered there by the gravity of a giant black hole.
Hubble researchers find a gaggle of small black holes | Engadget
Larger black holes may be the usual attention-getters, but the smaller ones may be at least as important. A team using the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a concentration of small black holes in the NGC 6397 globular star cluster (pictured above) 7,800 light-years away — the first to have its mass and extent recorded. While the researchers had hoped to find an elusive intermediate-mass black hole, this represents a breakthrough of its own.
Part of the challenge came from determining the mass. Scientists used the velocities of stars in the cluster, gathered over several years from both Hubble and the ESA's Gaia observatory, to find the masses of the black holes. The normally invisible bodies tugged stars around in "close to random" orbits rather than the neatly circular or elongated paths you'd normally see with black holes.
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