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Black Holes

SPACE: Are Traversable Wormholes Possible?

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Wormhole - Pixabay

Interested in scooting through a wormhole, the ultimate cheat-code through space and time? Perhaps you’d like to hop from star system to star system across the universe without breaking a sweat? But first, you’d better make sure your wormhole is traversable. “Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses,” João Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, told Live Science. Rosa is attempting to virtually “build” a stable, traversable wormhole, one that can be safely crossed without the theoretical passageway collapsing or trapping its occupant. And he … Read more

SPACE: What Are Dark Sirens, And Why Should You Care?

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black hole - pixabay

In recent years, cosmologists have been faced with a crisis: The universe is expanding, but no one can agree on how fast it’s moving away from us. That’s because different ways of measuring the Hubble constant, a fundamental parameter that describes this expansion, have produced conflicting results. But a single, lucky observation of what are known as dark sirens — black holes or neutron stars whose crashes can be picked up by gravitational wave detectors on Earth but remain invisible to ordinary telescopes — could help resolve this tension. As the cosmos expands, galaxies in the universe move away from … Read more

SPACE: What If Black Holes Aren’t Black – Or Holes?

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black holes - deposit photos

Black holes, those gravitational monsters so named because no light can escape their clutches, are by far the most mysterious objects in the universe. But a new theory proposes that black holes may not be black at all. According to a new study, these black holes may instead be dark stars home to exotic physics at their core. This mysterious new physics may cause these dark stars to emit a strange type of radiation; that radiation could in turn explain all the mysterious dark matter in the universe, which tugs on everything but emits no light. Dark Stars Thanks to … Read more

SPACE: new Theories on the Mysterious “Planet Nine”

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Planet Nine - pixabay

We have not one but two new theories for you about the solar system’s long-theorized and mysterious Planet Nine: Does the solar system have a big, dark ninth planet drifting somewhere far beyond the orbit of Neptune? Planet 9 Probably Doesn’t Exist Since 2016, many astronomers have said it’s possible, pointing to evidence for a large gravity source in deep solar space. But a new paper argues that this gravity source is nothing more than a statistical mirage, the consequence of where in the night sky astronomers point their telescopes. The first physical(CK) hint of this hypothetical Planet Nine was … Read more

SPACE: Black Hole’s Magnetic Fields Revealed

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Black Hole magnetic fields - NASA / EHT Collaboration

First-of-their-kind images of the magnetic field around a black hole may explain how the black hole shoots out a jet of energy and matter more than 5,000 light-years into space. The new images come from the first black hole ever photographed, which sits at the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy 55 million light-years away. In 2017, an international collaboration of more than 300 researchers coordinated 11 radio telescopes around the globe to observe the center of M87. The resulting joint telescope was dubbed the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). The result, released in 2019, was an image of … Read more

Growing Black Holes In a Lab? What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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black hole - pixabay

In 1974, Stephen Hawking theorized that the universe’s darkest gravitational behemoths, black holes, were not the pitch-black star swallowers astronomers imagined, but they spontaneously emitted light — a phenomenon now dubbed Hawking radiation. The problem is, no astronomer has ever observed Hawking’s mysterious radiation, and because it is predicted to be very dim, they may never will. Which is why scientists today are creating their own black holes. Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology did just that. They created a black hole analog out of a few thousand atoms. They were trying to confirm two of Hawking’s most important … Read more

You Had Me At “Black Hole Power Sucking Aliens”

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Black Hole Wormhole - Deposit Photo

Aliens could be sucking power from black holes — and that could be how we’d spot the extraterrestrials, scientists say. This energy-harvesting technology could leave traces just outside a spinning black hole’s event horizon — the boundary beyond which a black hole’s gravity becomes too strong for matter and energy to escape. And the process could explain at least some flares of plasma, a white-hot form of charged gas, that scientists have already detected near these massive disruptions in time and space. a new study published Jan. 13 in the journal Physical Review D proposes. And while it’s only a … Read more

What We Learned About Black Holes in 2020

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black holes - deposit photos

Physicists are currently in a golden age of new knowledge about black holes. Since 2015, researchers have been able to get signals directly from merging black holes using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), while observatories like the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) have produced the first image of a black hole’s shadow. This year was no exception, with a fresh crop of exciting and unique results expanding our black hole horizons. Here, we take a look at some of the most spectacular black hole findings of 2020.  Nobel Prize in physics goes to black holes As if to certify that this … Read more

SPACE: Is Dark Matter Really A Bunch of Tiny Black Holes?

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black hole - pixabay

The universe might be full of tiny, ancient black holes. And researchers might be able to prove it. These mini black holes from the beginning of time, or primordial black holes (PBHs), were first dreamed up decades ago. Researchers proposed them as an explanation for dark matter, an unseen substance that exerts a gravitational pull throughout space. Most explanations for dark matter involve hypothetical particles with special properties that help them evade detection. But some researchers think swarms of little black holes moving like clouds through space offer a cleaner explanation. Now, a new study explains where these PBHs might … Read more