black holes tagged posts

Scientists have discovered that a sphere of cold helium atoms (in green) — interacting with a surrounding larger container of the same kind of atoms (in blue) — follows a bizarre rule of physics, called an entanglement area law, also observed in black holes. This discovery points to a “deeper reality,” says University of Vermont physicist Adrian Del Maestro and may be a step toward using superfluid helium as the fuel of a new generation of ultra-fast quantum computers. Credit: Adrian Del Maestro/Nature Physics

A team has discovered that a law controlling the bizarre behavior of black holes out in space – is also true for cold helium atoms that can be studied in laboratories. “It’s called an entanglement area law,” says Adrian Del Maestro, a physicist at the University of Vermont...

This is an artist impression illustrating a supermassive black hole with X-ray emission emanating from its inner region (pink) and ultrafast winds streaming from the surrounding disk (purple). Credit: The European Space Agency (ESA)

Temperature swings of black hole winds measured for the 1st time. Black holes feed on the large disks of gas that swirl around them. Occasionally the black holes eat too much and burp out an ultra-fast wind, or outflow. These winds may have a strong influence on regulating the growth of the host galaxy by clearing the surrounding gas away and suppressing star formation. Scientists have now made the most detailed observation yet of such an outflow, coming from an active galaxy named IRAS 13224-3809...

A slab cut from the cube generated by the Illustris simulation. It shows the distribution of dark matter, with a width and height of 350 million light-years and a thickness of 300000 light years. Galaxies are found in the small, white, high-density dots. Credit: Markus Haider / Illustris collaboration. Click for a full size image

We live in a universe dominated by unseen matter, and on the largest scales, galaxies and everything they contain are concentrated into filaments that stretch around the edge of enormous voids. Thought to be almost empty until now, astronomers now believe these dark holes could contain as much as 20% of the ‘normal’ matter in the cosmos and that galaxies make up only 1/500th of the volume of the universe.

Looking at cosmic microwave radiation, modern satellite obs...

This illustration shows the locations and energy ranges of ASTRO-H science instruments and their associated telescopes. One keV equals 1,000 electron volts, which is hundreds of times the energy of visible light. Credits: JAXA/NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Black hole enthusiasts, galaxy cluster aficionados, and X-ray astronomers have much to be excited about. On Feb. 12, JAXA will be launching their 6th satellite dedicated to X-ray astronomy, ASTRO-H, from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima, Japan. The observatory carries a state-of-the-art instrument and 2 telescope mirrors built at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The launch is at 3:45 a.m. EST.

ASTRO-H is expected to provide breakthroughs in a wide variety of high-energy phenomena in the cosmos, ran...