black hole
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Physicists See Light Echoing From Behind a Black Hole for the First Time
Astrophysicists have detected light coming from the far side of a black hole, using telescopes to see physics predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity but not yet directly observed. The new findings affirmed ideas about how black holes warp light.
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Astronomers Don’t Know What Our Black Hole Ate, but They Definitely Saw It Belch
In May 2019, astronomers witnessed a bright flare coming from the centre of our galaxy. The event was caused by matter accreting to our local black hole, a 4.6-million-solar-mass monster named Sagittarius A*. The cause of the flaring was unknown, though one researcher now says enigmatic “G-objects” may be responsible.
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See a Black Hole’s Magnetic Fields in New Image From the Event Horizon Telescope
In April 2019, the world was spellbound, if only for a moment, by an ominous void encircled by a half-halo of light. It was the first direct image of a black hole; more specifically, a supermassive gravitational abyss at the core of Messier 87, a galaxy in the constellation Virgo some 54 million light-years from…
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Biggest Black Hole Turns Out to Be an Even Heftier Lad Than We Thought
When one of us (Ilya Mandel) started grad school at the California Institute of Technology 20 years ago, he was greeted with a series of bets hanging on the wall outside the office of his PhD advisor, Kip Thorne. One bet from 1974 was a wager with theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, on whether an observed…