Lifeboat Foundation

One week after LIGO switched back on, it has already detected the gravitational waves from another pair of merging black holes, marking the beginning of a new era of gravitational wave astronomy.

Tomorrow (April 10) at 3pm CEST (9am Eastern Time) the first results from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will be announced:

The scientific mission of the EHT is to capture an image of a black hole horizon. So far, we have indirect evidence for the existence of a black hole horizon, but have not actually “seen” one.

ESO, european organisation for astronomical research in the southern hemisphere.

Continue reading “Media Advisory: Press Conference on First Result from the Event Horizon Telescope” »

Bye bye supernova.

The world, it seems, is soon to see the first picture of a black hole.

On Wednesday, astronomers across the globe will hold “six major press conferences” simultaneously to announce the first results of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which was designed precisely for that purpose.

It has been a long wait.

Continue reading “Scientists set to unveil first picture of a black hole” »

Thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, Black Holes are about to be seen by humans for the first time.

Testing these six lenses — the largest of which is 1.1 meters in diameter — will continue for about six weeks at the Mayall Telescope near Tucson, Arizona. It’s part of an effort to get DESI up and running sometime this year.

When complete, DESI will measure the light of tens of millions of galaxies reaching back 12 billion light years. That will enable scientists to 3D map the universe like never before and to measure its expansion. Ultimately, scientists are looking for insight into dark energy, which makes up an estimated 68 percent of the universe and is said to be the force behind its accelerating expansion. Scientists on the research team say they’re just as excited to find what they’re looking for — a better understanding of dark energy — as they are to discover what other mysteries DESI might reveal.

Nearby in the sky is galaxy NGC 4725, roughly 41 million light years from Earth. Over 100,000 light years across, at least 4 supernovae have been observed in this galaxy since 1940!

Today our middle-aged Universe looks eerily smooth. Too smooth, in fact.

While a rapid growth spurt in space-time would explain what we see, science needs more than nice ideas. It needs evidence that whittles away contending arguments. We might finally know where to look for some.

A team of physicists from the Centre for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and Harvard University went back to the drawing board on the early Universe’s evolution to give us a way to help those inflation models stand out from the crowd.

Continue reading “What Existed Before The Big Bang? Astronomers Have Found a Test to Narrow It Down” »

They’ve captured our imaginations for decades, but we’ve never actually photographed a black hole before – until now.

Next Wednesday, at several press briefings around the world, scientists will apparently unveil humanity’s first-ever photo of a black hole, the European Space Agency said in a statement. Specifically, the photo will be of “Sagittarius A,” the supermassive black hole that’s at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

But aren’t black holes, well, black, and thus invisible, so none of our telescopes can “see” them? Yes – therefore the image we’re likely to see will be of the “event horizon,” the edge of the black hole where light can’t escape.

Continue reading “‘Something no human has seen before’: The first-ever photograph of a black hole will likely be unveiled next week” »