This computer simulation shows a star being shredded by the gravity of a massive black hole. Some of the stellar debris falls into the black hole and some of it is ejected into space at high speeds. The areas in white are regions of highest density, with progressively redder colors corresponding to lower-density regions. The… [Read more…]
April 30, 2012
An extraordinary outburst produced by a black hole in a nearby galaxy has provided direct evidence for a population of old, volatile stellar black holes. The discovery, made by astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, provides new insight into the nature of a mysterious class of black holes that can produce as much energy in… [Read more…]
April 12, 2012
Panagiota Kanti We review the current results for the emission of Hawking radiation by a higher-dimensional black hole during the Schwarzschild and the spin-down phases. We discuss particularly the role of the angular variation of the emitted radiation on the brane during the latter phase, the radiation spectra for gravitons in the bulk, and the… [Read more…]
April 7, 2012
Igor I. Smolyaninov As demonstrated by Chernodub, strong magnetic field forces vacuum to develop real condensates of electrically charged rho mesons, which form an anisotropic inhomogeneous superconducting state similar to Abrikosov vortex lattice. As far as electromagnetic field behaviour is concerned, this state of vacuum constitutes a hyperbolic metamaterial [1]. Here we demonstrate that spatial… [Read more…]
March 30, 2012
Detectable seismic consequences of the interaction of a primordial black hole with Earth Yang Luo, Shravan Hanasoge, Jeroen Tromp, Frans Pretorius Galaxies observed today are likely to have evolved from density perturbations in the early universe. Perturbations that exceeded some critical threshold are conjectured to have undergone gravitational collapse to form primordial black holes (PBHs) at… [Read more…]
March 24, 2012
Seong Chan Park In low-scale gravity models, a particle collider with trans-Planckian collision energies can be an ideal place for producing black holes because a large amount of energy can be concentrated at the collision point, which can ultimately lead to black hole formation. In this article, the theoretical foundation for microscopic higher dimensional black… [Read more…]
March 21, 2012
Speca – An Intriguing Look Into The Beginning Of A Black Hole Jet Its catalog number is NGC 3801, but its name is SPECA – a Spiral-host Episodic radio galaxy tracing Cluster Accretion. That’s certainly a mouthful of words for this unusual galaxy, but there’s a lot more going on here than just its name.… [Read more…]
March 10, 2012
… at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV CMS Collaboration A search for microscopic black holes in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 4.7 inverse femtobarns recorded by the CMS experiment at the LHC in 2011. Events with large total transverse energy have… [Read more…]
March 9, 2012
Umberto Maio, Massimo Dotti, Margarita Petkova, Albino Perego, Marta Volonteri Mass and spin are often referred to as the two `hairs’ of astrophysical black holes, as they are the only two parameters needed to completely characterize them in General Relativity. The interaction between black holes and their environment is where complexity lies, as the relevant… [Read more…]
February 28, 2012
curious correlation between the mass of a galaxy’s central black hole and the velocity of stars in a vast, roughly spherical structure known as its bulge has puzzled astronomers for years. An international team led by Francesco Tombesi at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now has identified a new type of black-hole-driven… [Read more…]
February 25, 2012
Masahiro Kawasaki, Alexander Kusenko, Tsutomu T. Yanagida Supermassive black holes exist in the centers of galaxies, including Milky Way, but there is no compelling theory of their formation. Furthermore, observations of quasars imply that supermassive black holes have already existed at some very high redshifts, suggesting the possibility of their primordial origin. In a class… [Read more…]
February 21, 2012
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have clocked the fastest wind yet discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole. This result has important implications for understanding how this type of black hole behaves. The record-breaking wind is moving about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. This… [Read more…]
February 17, 2012
First, build a telescope the size of planet Earth ….. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is an international project aimed at taking the first picture of a black hole, specifically of Sagittarius A*, the site of the black hole that is believed to be lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy….. ….. Getting there will… [Read more…]
February 15, 2012
This spectacular edge-on galaxy, called ESO 243-49, is home to an intermediate-mass black hole that may have been stripped off of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy. The estimated 20,000-solar-mass black hole lies above the galactic plane. This is an unlikely place for such a massive back hole to exist, unless it belonged to a small galaxy… [Read more…]
January 30, 2012
…. shows one of the coldest and most isolated places in the universe In a sky filled with bright stars, this image appears to show a massive black hole in its centre. But, rather than being a genuine black hle, the eerily dark ‘hole’ in this photograph is a cloud of matter - known to… [Read more…]
January 25, 2012
Frenetic star-forming activity in the early Universe is linked to the most massive galaxies in today’s cosmos, new research suggests. This “starbursting” activity when the Universe was just a few billion years old appears to have been clamped off by the growth of supermassive black holes. An international team gathered hints of the mysterious “dark… [Read more…]
January 17, 2012
L. Bellagamba, R. Casadio, R. Di Sipio, V. Viventi We investigate possible signatures of black hole events at the LHC in the hypothesis that such objects will not evaporate completely, but leave a stable remnant. For the purpose of defining a reference scenario, we have employed the publicly available Monte Carlo generator CHARYBDIS2, in which… [Read more…]
January 16, 2012
A new telescope array could allow scientists to photograph a black hole for the first time – teaming up 50 radio telescopes around the world into a global telescope that will capture the ‘shadow’ of a black hole for the first time. Scientists will meet on Wednesday 18th to discuss the project, which will also… [Read more…]
January 14, 2012
Mihalis Dafermos It is shown that for small, spherically symmetric perturbations of asymptotically flat two-ended Reissner-Nordstrom data for the Einstein-Maxwell-real scalar field system, the boundary of the dynamic spacetime which evolves is globally represented by a bifurcate null hypersurface across which the metric extends continuously. Under additional assumptions, it is shown that the Hawking mass… [Read more…]
January 4, 2012
Shahar Hod Black-hole spacetimes with a “photonsphere”, a hypersurface on which massless particles can orbit the black hole on circular null geodesics, are studied. We prove that among all possible trajectories (both geodesic and non-geodesic) which circle the central black hole, the null circular geodesic is characterized by the shortest possible orbital period as measured… [Read more…]
December 27, 2011
… around a Super Massive Black Hole Makoto Inoue, Hiromitsu Yokoo We describe a new system for a society of highly advanced civilizations around a super massive black hole (SMBH), as an advanced Type III “Dyson Sphere“, pointing out an efficient usage of energy for the advanced civilizations. SMBH also works as a sink for… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
http://youtu.be/YlHS-JlkYPI This animation compares the X-ray ‘heartbeats’ of GRS 1915 and IGR J17091, two black holes that ingest gas from companion stars. GRS 1915 has nearly five times the mass of IGR J17091, which at three solar masses may be the smallest black hole known. A fly-through relates the heartbeats to hypothesized changes in the… [Read more…]
December 14, 2011
Researchers have spotted a giant gas cloud spiralling into the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s centre. Though it is known that black holes draw in everything nearby, it will be the first chance to see one consume such a cloud. As it is torn apart, the turbulent area around the black hole will become… [Read more…]
December 12, 2011
PITTSBURGH — Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Bruce and Astrid McWilliams Center for Cosmology have discovered what caused the rapid growth of early supermassive black holes – a steady diet of cold, fast food. Computer simulations, completed using supercomputers at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and viewed using GigaPan… [Read more…]
December 3, 2011
Jonas Mureika, Piero Nicolini, Euro Spallucci We introduce analytical quantum gravity modifications of the production cross section for terascale black holes by employing an effective ultraviolet cut off ℓ. We find the new cross sections approach the usual “black disk” form at high energy, while they differ significantly near the fundamental scale from the standard… [Read more…]
November 17, 2011
New details about the birth of a famous black hole that took place millions of years ago have been uncovered, thanks to a team of scientists who used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory as well as from radio, optical and other X-ray telescopes. Over three decades ago, Stephen Hawking placed — and eventually lost… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
What do black holes eat? And do supermassive black holes have fiercer appetites? Let’s remind ourselves of the facts. Lurking at the centre of the Milky Way is a monster, a giant black hole with a mass four million times that of the sun. With its immense gravitational pull, Galactic Central is a very dangerous place, with… [Read more…]
November 9, 2011
Marcus Bleicher, Piero Nicolini, Martin Sprenger, Elizabeth Winstanley The possibility of creating microscopic black holes is one of the most exciting predictions for the LHC, with potentially major consequences for our current understanding of physics. We briefly review the theoretical motivation for micro black hole production, and our understanding of their subsequent evolution. Recent work… [Read more…]
November 2, 2011
The daily rumblings from the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy are the last throes of planets and asteroids plunging to their deaths, say astrophysicists At the centre of our galaxy sits a black hole about a million times more massive than our Sun. Called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, this supermassive… [Read more…]
October 29, 2011
Nikodem J. Poplawski If spacetime torsion couples to the intrinsic spin of matter according to the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity, then the resulting gravitational repulsion at supranuclear densities prevents the formation of singularities in black holes. Consequently, the interior of every black hole becomes a new universe that expands from a nonsingular bounce. We consider gravitational… [Read more…]
October 7, 2011
….but super-aliens may have already beaten us to it,’ claims Russian cosmologist Most advanced civilisation in the galaxy could already be living inside, claims Vyacheslav Dokuchaev Despite being considered the most destructive force in space and absolutely uninhabitable, the conditions for life exist inside supermassive black holes, a Russian cosmologist has theorised. Going out on… [Read more…]
September 29, 2011
A fleet of spacecraft including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered unprecedented details in the surroundings of a supermassive black hole. Observations reveal huge bullets of gas being driven away from the gravitational monster and a corona of very hot gas hovering above the disk of matter that is falling into the black hole. A… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
“We know that about 25% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but we don’t know what it is,” Michael Kesden tellsPhysOrg.com. “There are a number of different theories about what dark matter could be, but we think one alternative might be very small primordial black holes.” When many of us think about black… [Read more…]
September 15, 2011
Τhe supermassive black hole at the centre of a massive galaxy or galaxy cluster acts as a furnace, pumping heat into its surroundings. But astronomers have struggled to understand how a steady temperature is maintained throughout the whole galaxy when the black hole only appears to interact with nearby gas. Now, researchers in Canada and… [Read more…]
September 10, 2011
Every three hours, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope scans the entire sky and deepens its portrait of the high-energy universe. Every year, the satellite’s scientists reanalyze all of the data it has collected, exploiting updated analysis methods to tease out new sources. These relatively steady sources are in addition to the numerous transient events Fermi… [Read more…]
September 5, 2011
Watch this video and learn everything you’d ever want to know about spaghettification Now here’s an interesting thought to begin your work week: death by black hole. In this convergence between biology and astrophysics, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, talks about the process of… [Read more…]
September 3, 2011
We examine the ability to test the black hole no-hair theorem at the 10% level in this decade using the binary black hole in OJ287. In the test we constrain the value of the dimensionless parameter q that relates the scaled quadrupole moment and spin of the primary black hole: q2 = −q χ^2. At the… [Read more…]
August 21, 2011
We discuss the observable effects of enhanced black hole mass loss in a black hole-neutron star (BH-NS) binary, due to the presence of a warped extra spatial dimension of curvature radius L in the braneworld scenario. For some masses and orbital parameters in the expected ranges the binary components would outspiral—the opposite of the behavior due to… [Read more…]
August 15, 2011
A black hole’s event horizon is the ultimate last-chance saloon: beyond this boundary nothing, not even light, can escape. But does this “anything” include information itself? Physicists have spent the best part of four decades grappling with the “information paradox”, but now a group of researchers from the UK thinks it can offer a solution.… [Read more…]
August 13, 2011
In a paper published in the August 12 issue of the esteemed journal Physical Review Letters, researchers at the University of York made a monumental discovery, when they found that black holes tend to gulp up all the matter in their surroundings, but leak information. The new data adds to the growing database of knowledge we have… [Read more…]
July 27, 2011
The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity. The black hole is… [Read more…]
July 21, 2011
Whether on their own or orbiting as a pair, black holes don’t typically sit still. Not only do they spin, they can also move laterally across their host galaxy. And according to astrophysicists at Brigham Young University, both types of movement power massive jets of energy known as quasars. The study, which appears in the… [Read more…]
June 28, 2011
Using a vast array of radio telescopes, astronomers in North America are the first to make a direct measurement of the distance to Cygnus X-1, allowing them to conclude that the mass of its dark star is so great it can only be a black hole. They have also discovered that the black hole spins… [Read more…]
June 24, 2011
Introduction Whether he’s teaching class, socializing at a cocktail party or talking to visitors at the planetarium where he works, Charles Liu knows that sooner or later he’s going to get asked at least one of three questions: • Is there a God? • Are there aliens? • What would happen if I fell into… [Read more…]
June 21, 2011
M.R.S. Hawkins The aim of this paper is to present the case that stellar mass primordial black holes make up the dark matter component of the Universe. A near critical density of compact bodies implies that most lines of sight will be gravitationally microlensed, and the paper focuses on looking for the predicted effects on… [Read more…]
June 19, 2011
In what sounds like a one of a kind murder mystery, a dying star has fallen into a black hole and been ripped apart. The event, which was observed on March 28, was originally thought to be a gamma ray burst from a collapsing star but researchers suspected something more sinister was at play. Their… [Read more…]
June 18, 2011
On March 28, NASA’s Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope discovered a series of powerful X-ray blasts coming from a source in the constellation Draco. Astronomers around the world studied the unusual explosion, which is now known as Sw 1644+57. More than two months later, and with high-energy X-rays still coming from the spot, astronomers are convinced… [Read more…]
June 16, 2011
A letter published in Nature today announces the first observations of developing black holes in the early Universe. The discovery answers a long-standing question in astronomy: how early on were black holes forming, and what were the earliest ones like? The observations required a clever technique which stretched the capabilities of modern instruments. We have now imaged… [Read more…]
June 15, 2011
Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies. By pointing Chandra at… [Read more…]
June 14, 2011
CMS has recently produced an updated search for black hole production in the 7 TeV proton-proton collisions delivered by the LHC. The data sample now consists of 190 inverse picobarns of collisions collected in 2011, and the limits set on black hole production are more stringent. The search uses a variable called “S_T”, which is… [Read more…]
June 10, 2011
Read more: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/monster-black-holes.html
May 18, 2011
Scattering of black holes in 5 dimensions It may be widely believed that probing short-distance physics is limited by the presence of the Planck energy scale above which scale any information is cloaked behind a horizon. If this hypothesis is correct, we could observe quantum behavior of gravity only through a black hole of Planck mass. We… [Read more…]
May 4, 2011
Tiny black holes may be capable of capturing particles around them, forming the gravitational equivalent of atoms “The prospect of mini black holes, either primordial or in planned experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, interacting with the earth motivate us to examine how they may be detected and the scope of their impact on the earth. We… [Read more…]
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May 2, 2012
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