Category Astronomy/Space

The orbit of S0-2 (light blue) located near the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole will be used to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity and generate potentially new gravitational models. Credit: S. SAKAI/A.GHEZ/W. M. KECK OBSERVATORY/ UCLA GALACTIC CENTER GROUP

No companion found for famous young bright star orbiting Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Astronomers have the “all-clear” for an exciting test of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, thanks to a new discovery about S0-2’s star status. Up until now, it was thought that S0-2 may be a binary, a system where two stars circle around each other. Having such a partner would have complicated the upcoming gravity test.

A team of astronomers led by a UCLA scientist from Hawaii has found that S0-2 does not have a significant ...

Illustration of an “ultramassive” black hole detected by the team of astrophysicists. Credit: NASA

Thanks to data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope on galaxies up to 3.5 billion light years away from Earth, an international team of astrophysicists was able to detect what is likely to be the most massive black holes ever discovered in the universe. The team’s calculations showed that these “ultramassive” black holes are growing faster than the stars in their respective galaxies.

In their search for black holes, the two lead authors of the article published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society – Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, professor in the Department of Physics at Université de Montréal, and Mar Mezcua, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Space Sciences in Spain &#...

A spacetime diagram of the gravitational collapse of a charged spherical star to form a charged black hole. An observer traveling across the event horizon will eventually encounter the Cauchy horizon, the boundary of the region of spacetime that can be predicted from the initial data. UC Berkeley’s Peter Hintz and his colleagues found that a region of spacetime, denoted by a question mark, cannot be predicted from the initial data in a universe with accelerating expansion, like our own. This violates the principle of strong cosmic censorship. Credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker

Einstein’s equations allow a non-determinist future inside some black holes. Physicists insist on determinism: your past and present determine your future uniquely, per Einstein’s equations of general relativity...

Supernova 2016gkg (indicated by red bars) in the galaxy NGC 613, located about 40 million light years from Earth in the constellation Sculptor. Credit: Image by UC Santa Cruz and Las Campanas Observatory, Chile

First observation of optical light from shock breakout in a supernova explosion. First light from a supernova is hard to capture; no one can predict where and when a star will explode. An amateur astronomer has now captured on film this first light, emitted when the exploding core hits the star’s outer layers: shock breakout. Subsequent observations by astronomers using the Lick and Keck observatories helped identify it as a Type IIb supernova that slimmed down from 20 to 5 solar masses before exploding.

During tests of a new camera, Víctor Buso captured images of a distant galaxy b...