black holes
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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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Astronomers Looking for One Black Hole May Have Found an Entire Squad
About 7,800 light-years away — within our galactic neighbourhood — is globular cluster NGC 6397, basically a wad of stars held together by gravity. That bunch of stars was previously thought to have an intermediate-sized black hole at its centre. But upon further inspection, a team from the Paris Institute of Astrophysics has determined that…
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A Massive Radioactive Jet From the Early Universe Has Been Spotted
When the universe was a fledgling billion years old, a galaxy spewed a ginormous, fast-moving jet of radiation and plasma into the cosmos. Nearly 13 billion years later, that jet is visible to humans in the form of a blazar. The jet was recently imaged and analysed by a team of Italian astronomers. Their findings, which…
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Explained: 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded for Trailblazing Work on Black Holes
Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious objects in nature. They warp space and time in extreme ways and contain a mathematical impossibility, a singularity – an infinitely hot and dense object within. But if black holes exist and are truly black, how exactly would we ever be able to make an observation? Robert Penrose…