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Given that our first direct detections confirming the existence of black holes only took place in this century, humanity can be forgiven for not knowing a few things about these mysterious cosmic objects. We don't even know everything we don't know – a fact that's been made evident in a new discovery. While running equations for quantum gravity corrections for the entropy of a black hole, a pair of physicists found that black holes exert pressure on the space around them. Not much pressure, to be sure – but it's a finding that's fascinatingly consistent with Stephen Hawking's prediction that...

An incredibly bright flash that appeared in the night sky in February was the result of a star straying too close to a supermassive black hole, meeting its untimely end there as it was ripped to shreds. But the rare cosmic event actually occurred 8.5 billion light years away from Earth, when the universe was just a third of its current age — and it has created more questions than answers....

<p>Cops have launched an investigation into a series of mysterious assaults on crippled astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. The probe reportedly began after the author of the best seller "A Brief History of Time" was left stranded in his wheelchair in the garden of his country home last summer on the hottest day of the year.</p>

The Sun has always fascinated astronomers. And now, a new development has baffled scientists. A huge part of the Sun broke off of its surface and created a tornado-like swirl around its North Pole. Though scientists are trying to analyse how this occurred, the video of the development has stunned the space community.

The rotation of the Earth's inner core may be reversing, scientists have found in a study that sheds new light on geological processes occurring deep within our planet. The results of the research, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, indicate that changes in the rotation of the inner core could take place on a scale of decades. The study's authors told Newsweek the findings have implications for our understanding of how the core influences the other layers of the Earth.... ...these changes are likely part of an oscillation that takes place over roughly seven decades, with a previous turning point...

The black hole considered until now as “the closest to Earth” was discovered in 2020 just a thousand light years from our planet. However, a group of scientists concluded that it consists of a “vampire two-star system” in a rare and short-lived evolutionary stage. The theory of the experts is that the binary system was captured shortly after one of the stars sucked the atmosphere of the other. In this line and according to the scientific journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, they would be two luminous stars, but with very different angular separations and orbital movements. The study was carried out...

ASTROPHYSICS A team of University of Copenhagen astrophysicists has arrived at a major result regarding star populations beyond the Milky Way. The result could change our understanding of a wide range of astronomical phenomena, including the formation of black holes, supernovae and why galaxies die. The Andromeda galaxy, our Milky Way's closest neighbor, is the most distant object in the sky that you can see with your unaided eye. For as long as humans have studied the heavens, how stars look in distant galaxies has been a mystery. In a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of...

I first wrote about the topic of "Dark Matter" back in 2009, but it was scrubbed from the files of the Chico Enterprise Record Newspaper I wrote for and lost to history, after I was unceremoniously let me go. Well, I just found it in a file I was going through which someone sent me a few years ago. I lost the email address of the person, since I changed internet companies, even at that the person who sent not to me preferred to remain anonymous. Anyway, I updated this article with some new information and this is what I...

Powerful, radio-wavelength laser light has been detected emanating from the greatest distance across deep space yet. It's a type of massless cosmic object called a megamaser, and its light has traveled for a jaw-dropping 5 billion light-years to reach us here on Earth. The astronomers who discovered it using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have named it Nkalakatha – an isiZulu word meaning "big boss". The discovery has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available on preprint server arXiv. "It's impressive that, with just a single night of observations, we've already found a record-breaking megamaser,"...

For years, experts thought the biggest stars in the universe, red supergiants, died with a whimper. But in 2020, astronomers witnessed quite the opposite. One of these gleaming monsters -- 10 times more massive than the sun -- violently self-destructed after presenting the cosmos with a final, radiant beacon of starlight. ..Jacobson-Galán is the lead author of a paper published Thursday in The Astrophysical Journal that documents the star's eruption as well as its last, 130-day hurrah.... ...The star's extreme illumination indicated it wasn't dormant, or quiescent, as previously observed red supergiants had been prior to their demise. This shiny...

Source:   University Of Missouri-Rolla (http://www.umr.edu) Date:   Posted 7/17/2002 The Sun: A Great Ball Of Iron? For years, scientists have assumed that the sun is an enormous mass of hydrogen. But in a paper presented before the American Astronomical Society, Dr. Oliver Manuel, a professor of nuclear chemistry at UMR, says iron, not hydrogen, is the sun's most abundant element. Manuel claims that hydrogen fusion creates some of the sun's heat, as hydrogen -- the lightest of all elements -- moves to the sun's surface. But most of the heat comes from the core of an exploded supernova...

Earth's atmosphere is rising because of climate change, a new study shows. Weather balloon measurements, taken in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 40 years, reveal that the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere — called the troposphere — has been expanding upward at a rate of roughly 164 feet (50 meters) per decade, and climate change is the cause, according to findings published Nov.r 5 in the journal Science Advances. ... ...Climate change isn't the only human-made driver of the rising tropopause. The stratosphere — the layer above the troposphere — is also shrinking....

12 July 2021 Danish Student solves how the Universe is reflected near black holesAstrophysics:In the vicinity of black holes, space is so warped that even light rays may curve around them several times. This phenomenon may enable us to see multiple versions of the same thing. While this has been known for decades, only now do we have an exact, mathematical expression, thanks to Albert Sneppen, student at the Niels Bohr Institute. The result, which even is more useful in realistic black holes, has just been published in the journal Scientific Reports. A disk of glowing gas swirls into the...

(CNN)Astronomers have discovered a new type of supernova, or star explosion, and it provides a new window into the violent life cycle of stars. The new research, focused on supernova 2018zd, confirms a prediction made by University of Tokyo astronomer Ken'ichi Nomoto more than 40 years ago.... ...Typically, supernovae occur in two flavors. During a core-collapse supernova, a massive star (more than 10 times the mass of our sun) exhausts its fuel and the star's core caves in to a black hole or a dense remnant called a neutron star. The other type is called a thermonuclear supernova, and it...

First of all, what is the black hole information loss problem, or paradox, as it’s sometimes called. It’s an inconsistency in physicists’ currently most fundamental laws of nature, that’s quantum theory and general relativity. Stephen Hawking showed in the early nineteen-seventies that if you combine these two theories, you find that black holes emit radiation. This radiation is thermal, which means besides the temperature, that determines the average energy of the particles, the radiation is entirely random. This black hole radiation is now called Hawking Radiation and it carries away mass from the black hole. But the radius of the...

NASA may have ruled that Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever spotted in our system is a "metallic or rocky object" approximately 400 meters (1,312 feet) in length and 40 meters (131 feet) wide, but a new study from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics says it could be something much more exciting – it could be "a lightsail of artificial origin" sent from another civilization. The study, which was posted online earlier this month, suggests that Oumuamua's strange "excess acceleration" could be artificial in nature, as it has been implied that it is not an active comet.

Hey — guess what? There's something cosmically special about us human beings after all. Even the Washington Post says so. One of the cardinal tenets of a worldview shaped by materialism and Neo-Darwinism is a rejection of the idea that human beings are in any way special. Instead, we're merely the result of a fortuitous accident. What's more, many adherents postulate that this accident has occurred, perhaps even often, elsewhere in the Cosmos. So there's nothing exceptional or unique about us. However, Howard A. Smith, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian-Harvard Center for Astrophysics, begs to differ. In a recent Washington...

American space agency, the NASA had recently observed flares of X-rays from a black hole, which goes against the conventional notion that they are compact particles with such huge gravity that even light can't escape. Last month NASA announced that two of its space telescopes caught a huge burst of X-ray spewing out of a super massive black hole. These flairs appeared to be be triggered by the eruption of a charged particle from the black hole, which according to conventional belief doesn't let anything out. The latest findings are in accordance with the theory of Indian astrophysicist Abhas Mitra...

A team of Antarctic scientists has just verified the existence of cosmic neutrinos — tiny, energetic particles that might hail from far reaches of the Milky Way and beyond. And these ghostly little flecks of matter could hold the key to some of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. High-energy cosmic neutrinos are thought to be produced by some of the universe’s most violent agents, including black holes, supernovae, and the energetic cores of galaxies. Unchanged as they zip across space and time, these particles may represent something of an intergalactic breadcrumb trail, pointing us in the direction of any...

One of the great physics experiments of our age looks ready to begin its quest.Scientists have held a dedication ceremony to inaugurate the Advanced Ligo facilities in the US. This pair of widely separated laboratories will be hunting for gravitational waves. These ripples in the fabric of space-time are predicted to result from extreme cosmic events, such as the merger of black holes and the explosive demise of giant stars. Confirmation of the waves' existence should open up a new paradigm in astronomy. It is one that would no longer depend on traditional light telescopes to observe and understand phenomena...