Black hole hole

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which famously captured the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019, has done it again — this time capturing an image of a black hole within our own galaxy. They have released an image of the enormous supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A* (pronounced “sadge-ay-star”). This monster black hole has a mass 4.3 million times the mass of the sun — though that makes it considerably smaller than the black hole previously imaged at the heart of Messier 87 , which was calculated to be an almost incomprehensible 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun. Imaging a black hole is no easy task as these objects are so dense that they absorb anything that comes near them, even light. But that doesn’t mean that they are invisible, as the gas which comes close to them but has not yet been sucked into them glows brightly. It is this glowing gas that the EHT astronomers searched for, which forms a ring … [Read more...] about First ever image of black hole at heart of the Milky Way | Digital Trends

Using data collected from the International Space Station (ISS), physicists have been investigating an explosion of X-ray light that originated from a black hole in an outburst phase. The data suggests that during an outburst, black holes consume huge amounts of stellar material and shrink in size by a factor of ten. The data was gathered from a black hole named MAXI J1820+070 which was detected on March 11, 2018 using the Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) instrument aboard the ISS . The MAXI is an X-ray detection system which monitors for X-ray outbursts like the ones given off by black holes in their outburst phase. “This boomingly bright black hole came on the scene, and it was almost completely unobscured, so we got a very pristine view of what was going on,” Jack Steiner, a research scientist in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement . An outburst is a phase in the evolution of a black … [Read more...] about Black Holes Devour Stars and Spew Brilliant X-rays During Outburst Phase | Digital Trends

Something that has puzzled astronomers about black holes is how they merge and grow, as they have found both small black holes and very large ones — but no intermediate ones. The smallest black holes discovered have been around five times the mass of our sun, and the largest are hundreds of millions of times the mass of the sun. The missing intermediates are in the range of hundreds or thousands of times the mass of the sun. Hunting black holes is difficult because they do not emit any light, although some do give out bursts of energy which can be detected. However, others — called ‘quiet’ black holes — give out very little energy and are almost invisible. Now a team of Japanese astronomers has located one such quiet intermediate black hole by observing not the black hole itself, but a cloud of gas near the center of the galaxy which was moving strangely. They looked 25,000 light-years away from Earth at the HCN–0.009–0.044 gas cloud using an instrument called ALMA (Atacama … [Read more...] about Ninja-like Black Hole Discovered Gobbling up a Gas Cloud | Digital Trends

When you think about America’s space program, your mind probably jumps to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, the space race between America and the USSR, or perhaps some of the agency’s famous crafts like the space shuttle or the Hubble Space Telescope . But behind all those iconic moments, memories, and machines is NASA’s unique place in America’s racial struggle. Contents The astronauts Beyond the astronauts Today’s NASA pioneers Over the course of its history, NASA has both participated in racial discrimination and contributed to the fight against it. Like many other places in America, the agency that later became NASA, called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), participated in racial segregation. That ended when it became NASA in 1958, but the underlying racial issues of its past echoed for years to come. As a result, Black Americans didn’t generally get the same opportunities as their white counterparts at NASA in … [Read more...] about These Black pioneers were pillars of the U.S space program | Digital Trends

In 2020, astronomers announced they had found the closest black hole ever , located just 1,000 light-years away. However, recent research suggests that the object in question is not actually a black hole, but is rather a rare form of two-star “vampire” system. The system, called HR 6819, was originally thought to be a three system, with two stars orbiting a black hole — one star near to the black hole and the other much further away. But other researchers suggested a different interpretation of the data, with two stars orbiting each other and no black hole, where one of the stars was “stripped” down to a much lower mass. The two teams of researchers, both those who made the original finding and those who proposed the alternative theory, joined forces to research the possibilities. New data gathered using the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Very Large Telescope shows that there are two stars orbiting each other closely, supporting the idea of a stripped star. “These data … [Read more...] about Closest black hole isn’t a black hole but a stellar vampire | Digital Trends