Spaghettification supermassive black holes

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

We’re coming to the end of Black Hole Week, NASA’s celebration of the beastly cosmic monsters which suck in light, matter, and everything else that comes too close to them. But just because they eat light doesn’t mean black holes are impossible to imagine. As part of the festivities, the media department at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has shared a selection of some of the best visualizations of black holes , so you can get an idea of what these mind-bending phenomena are like. The images, which are also available as desktop and mobile wallpapers should you wish to decorate your devices with black hole imagery, show simulations and visualizations created to try and picture what the weird effects of the extreme gravitational forces around a black hole would be. They include a simulation of a binary system consisting of two interacting black holes: A visualization of a similar black hole binary: An illustration of the disk of matter swirling around a black hole, called the … [Read more...] about See NASA’s visualizations of black holes for Black Hole Week | Digital Trends

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

The release of a remarkable image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy isn’t only an incredible scientific achievement — it also agrees precisely with predictions about what black holes are and how these strange objects are formed by the power of gravity. The black hole, called Sagittarius A*, is a type called a supermassive black hole, which is found at the center of almost all galaxies. Ours is on the smaller end for such giants: At 4.3 million times the mass of the sun, it’s much smaller than other monsters like the one is Messier 87 which was imaged in 2019 and which is 6.5 billion times the mass of the sun. However, images of these two black holes look notably similar, both showing a distinctive donut shape. And that agrees precisely with physicists’ predictions, which said that black holes would appear the same no matter what size they are. “The fact that the light appears like a ring, with the black shadow inside, tells you it’s purely gravity,” black hole … [Read more...] about Black holes all look the same, regardless of their size | 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