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Here’s how over 300 astronomers captured the dazzling first image of Sagittarius A*, and why it matters.

Our team was part of the global Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, which has used observations from a worldwide network of eight radio telescopes on our planet — collectively forming a single, Earth-sized virtual telescope — to take the stunning image. The breakthrough follows the collaboration’s 2019 release of the first-ever image of a black hole, called M87*, at the center of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy.

Black holes: Looking into darkness

Continue reading “The supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy proves Einstein right” »

“Some of them are beautiful — they show up like harp-shaped strings next to each other,” says Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University who led a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on the strands.

But researchers are still unsure about the cause of these features in the cosmos. “The big question is: What is the origin of these filaments?” Yusef-Zadeh says. “The puzzle is still there and the mystery continues.”

One hypotheses suggests they might be related to the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which was captured in an image for the first time ever this week.

Supernovas might spell the end for the star they happen to, but they aren’t only destructive phenomena. When a star approaches the end of its life and runs out of fuel, it explodes in an enormous outpouring of energy, leaving behind a small, dense core that becomes a black hole or a neutron star. This explosion, though destructive on an epic scale, can also leave behind a beautiful remnant created by the explosion’s shock wave.

A image recently released by the Hubble Space Telescope team shows one such supernova remnant, called DEM L249. Captured by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument and located in the constellation of Mensa, this delicate structure is formed from dust and gas ejected outward from the star’s location by the force of the blast.

“This object — known as DEM L249 — is thought to have been created by a Type 1a supernova during the death throes of a white dwarf,” the Hubble scientists write. “While white dwarfs are usually stable, they can slowly accrue matter if they are part of a binary star system. This accretion of matter continues until the white dwarf reaches a critical mass and undergoes a catastrophic supernova explosion, ejecting a vast amount of material into space in the process.”

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Wouldn’t it be cool to have a little black hole in your office? You know, maybe as a trash bin. Or to move around the furniture. Or just as a kind of nerdy gimmick. Why can we not make black holes? Or can we? If we could, what could we do with them? And what’s a black hole laser? That’s what we’ll talk about today.

Continue reading “What would it take to make a black hole? And what’s a black hole laser?” »

There have appeared many new scientific discoveries since that time, and many of them shake the foundations of the famous theory. It’s full of gaps and unanswered questions. So doesn’t this mean it’s not that perfect?

In this video, I’ll tell you: how many dimensions can the Universe have? What if the world was made of liquid? And most importantly, you’ll find out why the Big Bang theory can be wrong.

Lasers support certain structures of light known as “eigenmodes.” An international collaboration of experts in gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.

The supermassive black hole, which weighs as much as 4.3 million suns, is only the second ever to be imaged.