black hole tagged posts

With the upgraded GRAVITY-instrument at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory, a team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has determined the mass of a black hole in a galaxy only 2 billion years after the Big Bang...

Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by...

Astronomers have observed a black hole burping up stellar remains years after it shredded and consumed the star. In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky.

But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say.

“This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvar...

NASA this week shared an audio clip on social media that allows you to “hear” a black hole.
No surprise, the sound is terrifying.

NASA Exoplanets, a team at the agency focused on planets and other information outside of our solar system, tweeted the 34-second clip on Sunday and said there’s a “misconception” that there is no sound in space.

But they explained that “A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with other data, to hear a black hole.”

NASA initially released the so-called “sonification” earlier this year, explaining that researchers have “associated” the black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster with sound since 2003.

“This is because astronomers discovered that pressure wave...