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What Happens If A Star Explodes Near The Earth?Veritasium | November 15, 2022

When the Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft first detected the flash within the constellation Draco, astronomers thought it was a gamma-ray burst from a collapsing star. On March 31, however, UC Berkeley's Joshua Bloom sent out an email circular suggesting that it wasn't a typical gamma-ray burst at all, but a high-energy jet produced as a star about the size of our sun was shredded by a black hole a million times more massive. Careful analysis of the Swift data and subsequent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirmed Bloom's initial insight. The details are...

Scientists have seen the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst just nine minutes after the explosion, a result of precision coordination and fast slewing of ground-based telescopes upon detection of the burst by NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE) satellite. The quick turnaround has so far allowed scientists to determine a minimum distance to the explosion, which likely marks the creation of a black hole. Results continue to pour in, as nearly 100 telescopes in 11 countries have tracked the burst. The burst was detected on Friday, Oct. 4, at 8:06 a.m. EDT. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory observed...

Explanation: Why would x-ray rings appear around a gamma-ray burst? The surprising answer has little to do with the explosion itself but rather with light reflected off areas of dust-laden gas in our own Milky Way Galaxy. GRB 221009A was a tremendous explosion -- a very bright gamma-ray burst (GRB) that occurred far across the universe with radiation just arriving in our Solar System last week. Since GRBs can also emit copious amounts of x-rays, a bright flash of x-rays arrived nearly simultaneously with the gamma-radiation. In this case, the X-rays also bounced off regions high in dust right here...

Astronomers have published a major finding: A black hole has been "burping" out energy from a small star it was observed shredding in 2018, after two years in which it didn't eject any such material. How unusual is this? "Super unusual," Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, tells NPR. "We've never really seen this before to this degree." Researchers made the discovery when they used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico – to check in on some two dozen black holes...

Strange Long-Lasting Pulse of High-Energy Radiation Swept Over Earth Record Breaking Gamma Ray Burst Astronomers think GRB 221009A represents the birth of a new black hole formed within the heart of a collapsing star. In this illustration, the black hole drives powerful jets of particles traveling near the speed of light. The jets pierce through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays as they stream into space. Credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWildeNASA’s Swift and Fermi Missions Detect Exceptional Cosmic BlastAn unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation swept over Earth Sunday, October 9, captivating astronomers around the world. The intense emission...

Periodically, these gravitational behemoths will devoir stars and other objects in their vicinity, releasing tremendous amounts of light and radiation. In October 2018, astronomers witnessed one such event when observing a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light-years from Earth....another team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics noticed something unprecedented when they examined the same black hole three years later. As they explained in a recent study, the black hole was shining very brightly because it was ejecting...leftover material from the star at half the speed of light. [T]he team observed the outburst while revisiting data...

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...

Almost seven years ago (September 14th, 2015), researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detected gravitational waves (GWs) for the first time. Their results were shared with the world six months later and earned the discovery team the Noble Prize in Physics the following year. Since then, a total of 90 signals have been observed that were created by binary systems of two black holes, two neutron stars, or one of each. This latter scenario presents some very interesting opportunities for astronomers. If a merger involves a black hole and neutron star, the event will produce GWs and a...

Black Hole Police Spot Extragalactic Black Hole Using the Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own. A stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own, has been found by a team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says project leader Tomer Shenar. Furthermore, they discovered that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished with...

A fiery-looking, red-orange energetic jet blasting bright light from the center of a galaxy. An artist's illustration of neutrinos originating from a high-energy Blazar Benjamin Amend, Clemson University Born in the cradle of deep space, blasting across the universe at nearly the speed of light and harnessing energy up to a million times greater than anything achieved by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, cosmic rays are atom fragments that relentlessly rain down on Earth. They get caught in our atmosphere and mess up our satellites. They threaten the health of astronauts living in orbit, even when sparse in number....

Astronomers have detected the brightest and fastest-growing black hole to have existed in the last 9 billion years. The enormous cosmic entity is 3 billion times more massive than the sun and swallows up an Earth-size chunk of matter every second. The new supermassive black hole, known as J1144, is around 500 times as Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, which was recently photographed for the first time. A ring of superhot plasma around the enormous void also emits around 7,000 times more light than our entire galaxy. Australian astronomers discovered the cosmic...

Supermassive Black Hole Spewing Out Jets An artist’s conception of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Credit: Image courtesy of ESA/AOES Medialab ************************************************************************************** Update: Meet Sagittarius A* – Astronomers Reveal First Image of the Black Hole at the Heart of the Milky Way Today (May 12, 2022) at 9:00 a.m. EDT (6:00 a.m. PDT, 15:00 CEST) The European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project will hold a press conference to present new Milky Way results from the EHT. The ESO Director General will deliver the opening words. EHT Project Director Huib Jan...

The supermassive blackhole at the center of SgrA*. (EHT Collaboration) =================================================================== Four and a half billion years ago, our pale blue dot was born in the rubble left over from the birth of a star. Since then, we've been locked in a cosmic dance; Earth whirls around the Sun; and the Sun whirls around the galactic center, the dark, mysterious heart of the Milky Way. Contained in that dark heart, around which the entire galaxy revolves, is a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*, clocking in at around 4.3 million times the mass of the Sun. We've been able to...

In two weeks' time, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is going to present the world with new information about our Milky Way. It's anyone's guess what the announcement will be, but based on what we know of their recent efforts, there's reason to get excited – the results being presented are from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project, which was responsible for producing the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019. For years now the EHT project has been studying the heart of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is most likely home to a supermassive black hole...

Explanation: What does a black hole look like? To find out, radio telescopes from around the Earth coordinated observations of black holes with the largest known event horizons on the sky. Alone, black holes are just black, but these monster attractors are known to be surrounded by glowing gas. This first image resolves the area around the black hole at the center of galaxy M87 on a scale below that expected for its event horizon. Pictured, the dark central region is not the event horizon, but rather the black hole's shadow -- the central region of emitting gas darkened by...

Artist’s impression of GNz7q (ESA/Hubble, N. Bartmann) A first-of-its-kind 'missing link' object detected in the early Universe may solve the mystery of the oldest supermassive black holes in existence, scientists say. The discovery of GNz7q, a black hole dating back to just 750 million years after the Big Bang, aligns with theoretical predictions of what an 'ancestor' to supermassive black holes might look like – and while it's something we've never seen before, there could be many more like it. "It's unlikely that discovering GNz7q … was just 'dumb luck'," says astronomer Gabriel Brammer from the University of Copenhagen in...

New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for additional federal infrastructure spending on top of the already massive legislation signed into law by President Biden last year. "We need even more infrastructure investment than we received in last year's historic legislation," Adams said during remarks at the U.S. Conference ff Mayors Winter Meeting Thursday.

The five-decade-old paradox — long thought key to linking quantum theory with Einstein’s theory of gravity — is falling to a new generation of thinkers. Netta Engelhardt is leading the way. =============================================================================== In 1974, Stephen Hawking calculated that black holes’ secrets die with them. Random quantum jitter on the spherical outer boundary, or “event horizon,” of a black hole will cause the hole to radiate particles and slowly shrink to nothing. Any record of the star whose violent contraction formed the black hole — and whatever else got swallowed up after — then seemed to be permanently lost. Hawking’s calculation...

CNN anchor Don Lemon ripped the man who accosted Tucker Carlson in a Montana fly fishing shop, saying he had no right to invade the Fox News host’s “personal space.” The liberal Lemon offered his surprising take during his CNN program “Don Lemon Tonight” Monday evening, when he devoted an entire segment to addressing the weekend encounter, which he said put him in a position “to maybe somehow have to defend Tucker Carlson.” “Let me tell you this: I don’t like it. I don’t like it when people do that because I would not want it to happen to me,”...