An artist's impression of a lensing event. Light (purple) bends around an object in space, like a black hole, splitting into different paths -- one arrives faster than the other.
Scanning through a catalog of over 2,700 energetic deep space explosions captured by NASA's Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, James Paynter's task was to find a needle in a needle stack. The doctoral student, from the University of Melbourne, wanted to find one of the explosions, a gamma-ray burst, that had been "lensed" -- its path interrupted by a mammoth cosmic object on its way to the Earth.
In case you are keeping track:
A Coin-Sized Black Hole Would Destroy Earth—Here's How
On March 29, a Reddit user posted an animation of what they claimed was a recreation of what would happen if a penny-sized black hole landed on Earth.
It was later found to be fake because the animation was actually stock CGI footage of the Earth being destroyed without any black hole modeling, but not before the post had amassed over 5,000 comments and over 60,000 upvotes. The footage can be seen below.
A penny-sized black hole would have roughly the same mass as the Earth for reasons explained later.
Explosion from the early universe illuminates secret black hole | Space
Light coming from an explosion in the early universe has illuminated a black hole that astronomers think could expand their understanding of how the celestial objects form.
The light coming from the gamma-ray burst allowed the team to use a phenomenon called gravitational lensing to find an IMBH. This finding supports the existence of IMBHs, as they are so hard to detect that some scientists question whether or not they're even real. This work also sheds light on how different types of black holes might form and how supermassive black holes (SMBH) could get so massive.
Astronomers Have Captured the Most Detailed Photo of a Black Hole Ever—See the Magnetic Fields
The new image was taken two years after the same astronomers captured the first photo of a black hole.
Two years ago, astronomers managed to photograph a black hole for the very first time . The team behind the Event Horizon Telescope project was awarded the Breakthrough Prize—known as the Oscars of science—for their effort, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired the image in the form of an inkjet print.
In case you are keeping track:
New black hole, 'Goldilocks', believed to have formed before the first stars and galaxies,
Researchers found the black hole through the detection of a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst.
A newly discovered black hole could be an ancient relic created before the first stars and galaxies formed, scientists say.
Approximately 55,000 times the mass of the sun, researchers say this black hole may be the "seed" of the supermassive black holes which exist today - and could help scientists estimate the total number of these objects in the universe.
A Gamma-Ray Burst Just Revealed a 'Goldilocks' Black Hole in The Early Universe
Scientists have reported the discovery of a rare, medium-sized black hole that may help answer one of the more tantalizing questions in astronomy: how do their supermassive counterparts come into being?
There are two well-known sizes of black hole - at one end, so-called stellar-class ones which are typically three to ten times the mass of our Sun - and at the other, supermassive ones, found at the center of most galaxies, including the Milky Way, which are millions to billions times heavier.
Is there an ancient black hole at the edge of the solar system? | New Scientist
They believe that this hypothetical world, known as Planet Nine, betrays its presence by the way its gravity has aligned the orbits of a group of these small, icy bodies. The problem is that no one can imagine how a planet big enough to do that could form so far from the sun. “All we know is that there’s an object of a certain mass out there,” says Jakub Scholtz , a theorist at Durham University in the UK.
But if not a planet, then what? Scholtz suspects it could be something even more exotic: a primordial black hole, one forged in the big bang.
Blasts of intergalactic radiation hint at elusive mid-sized black hole | New Scientist
What may be a medium-sized black hole was found through the detection of a gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst
Rachel Webster at the University of Melbourne in Australia and her colleagues spotted this cosmic middleweight by examining archival data on about 2700 gamma-ray bursts , extraordinarily bright flashes of radiation thought to come from massive explosions in other galaxies. They searched this catalogue for evidence of gravitational lensing, which occurs when a massive, dense object stretches light around it.
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