Space and astronomy news
Dr. Stephen Hawking delivered a disturbing theory in 1974 that claimed black holes evaporate. He said black holes are not absolutely black and cold but rather radiate energy and do not last forever. So-called “Hawking radiation” became one of the physicist’s most famous theoretical predictions. Now, 40 years later, a researcher has announced the creation of …
Continue reading “Hawking Radiation Replicated in a Laboratory?”
NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) has captured a spectacular event: a supermassive black hole’s gravity tugging on nearby X-ray light. In just a matter of days, the corona — a cloud of particles traveling near the speed of light — fell in toward the black hole. The observations are a powerful test of Einstein’s …
Continue reading “NASA’S NuSTAR Catches a Black Hole Bending Light, Space, and Time”
They are what is known as the “lighthouses” of the universe – rotating neutron stars that emit a focused beam of electromagnetic radiation that is only visible if you’re standing in it’s path. Known as pulsars, these stellar relics get their name because of the way their emissions appear to be “pulsating” out into space. …
“Say, do you like mystery stories? Well we have one for you. The concept: relativity.” Well look at that, it’s a new video from John D. Boswell — aka melodysheep — which goes into autotuned detail about one of the standard principles of astrophysics, Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Featuring clips from Michio Kaku, Brian …
Hubble mosaic of massive galaxy cluster MACS J0717.5+3745, thought to be connected by a filament of dark matter. Credit: NASA, ESA, Harald Ebeling (University of Hawaii at Manoa) & Jean-Paul Kneib (LAM) Even though teams of scientists around the world are at this very moment hot on the trail of dark matter — the “other stuff” that the …
Caption: BepiColombo’s components separating at Mercury. Image Credit: Astrium BepiColombo, due to launch in 2015, will be only the third spacecraft to visit Mercury and the first to be sent by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Currently undergoing tests at ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC) …
Astronomers have known for some time there was one star orbiting fairly close to the black hole at the center of our galaxy. But now another star has been found dipping close and orbiting even faster around the Milky Way’s central black hole. Astronomer Andrea Ghez from UCLA says the ability to watch these two …
Continue reading “Two Stars Do a Short-Orbit Tango Around the Milky Way’s Black Hole”
When a star suffered an untimely demise at the hands of a hidden black hole, astronomers detected its doleful, ululating wail — in the key of D-sharp, no less — from 3.9 billion light-years away. The resulting ultraluminous X-ray blast revealed the supermassive black hole’s presence at the center of a distant galaxy in March …
Continue reading “A Star’s Dying Scream May Be a Beacon for Physics”
Albert Einstein’s revolutionary general theory of relativity describes gravity as a curvature in the fabric of spacetime. Mathematicians at University of California, Davis have come up with a new way to crinkle that fabric while pondering shockwaves. “We show that spacetime cannot be locally flat at a point where two shockwaves collide,” says Blake Temple, …
[/caption] A special project to search for pulsars has bagged the first student discovery of a millisecond pulsar – a super-fast spinning star, and this one rotates about 324 times per second. The Pulsar Search Collaboratory (PSC) has students analyzing real data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope …
Continue reading “Students Discover Millisecond Pulsar, Help in the Search for Gravitational Waves”