Black Holes
Has a Recent, Nearby Supernova Become a Baby Black Hole?
[/caption] Back in 1979, amateur astronomer Gus Johnson discovered a supernova about 50 million light years away from Earth, when…
What Hanny’s Voorwerp Reveals About Quasar Deaths
[/caption]Hanny's Voorwerp is a popular topic of conversation due to its novel discovery by Hanny Van Arkel perusing images from…
Hawking(ish) Radiation Observed
In 1974, Steven Hawking proposed a seemingly ridiculous hypothesis. Black holes, the gravitational monsters from which nothing escapes, evaporate. To…
The Black Hole/Globular Cluster Correlation
[/caption] Often in astronomy, one observable property traces another property which may be more difficult to observe directly; X-ray activity…
Powerhouse Black Hole Blows a Huge Bubble
[/caption] A relatively small black hole is producing tremendously powerful jets while creating a huge bubble of hot gas. Both…
Galaxy Mergers Make Black Holes ‘Light Up’
Only about 1% of supermassive black holes emit large amounts of energy, and astronomers have wondered for decades why so…
Black Hole Gets Kicked Out of Galaxy
[/caption] Supermassive black holes are thought to lie at the center of most large galaxies. But off in a distant…
Is Our Universe Inside Another Larger Universe?
[/caption] A wormhole is a hypothetical "tunnel" connecting two different points in spacetime, and in theory, at each end of…
Astronomers Find Black Holes Do Not Absorb Dark Matter
[/caption] There's the common notion that black holes suck in everything in the nearby vicinity by exerting a strong gravitational…
Can a Really, Really Fast Spacecraft Turn Into A Black Hole?
This question was posed in an Astronomy Cast episode a while back. It offers an interesting thought experiment, although a…