Free Republic

Friday on FNC’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) dismissed the possibility of the so-called “big, beautiful” spending bill stalling out on Capitol Hill because of Tesla CEO and former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk’s critique. “All right, Speaker,” host Jesse Watters said. “Is Elon going to derail the big, beautiful bill?” “Absolutely not,” Johnson replied. “Look, we are feeling the same energy that the President is. He’s leading. He’s delivering on his promises, and we all are. The big, beautiful bill is basically all those campaign speeches reduced to legislation. That’s what it is,...

United States President Donald Trump commented on Friday that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, are both "stubborn." "I have known [Putin] very well. I have gone through a lot of things with him ... [But] I have gotten to see things that I was very surprised at: rockets being shot into cities like Kiev, during a negotiation that I felt was maybe very close to ending. We were gonna solve a problem, and then, all of a sudden, rockets got shot into a couple of cities," the US head of state said during a...

US President Donald Trump has appeared to set a two-week deadline for Vladimir Putin, threatening a different response if the Russian counterpart was still stringing him along. As the Kremlin escalated its attacks on Ukraine, Trump was asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday if he thought Putin wanted to end the war. "I can't tell you that, but I'll let you know in about two weeks," Trump told reporters, the latest amid a string of critical public remarks made by Trump about Putin. Since Sunday, Trump has written multiple posts on social media saying that Putin has gone "absolutely...

Russia criticized the U.S. for its Golden Dome anti-missile system, announced recently by President Donald Trump, saying it undermines strategic stability. Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, told Washington to abandon the deployment of weapons in space. Her comments came at a press briefing on Tuesday morning and were reported by TASS, a Russian state news agency. -snip- Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said at a press briefing: "This highly offensive system violates the principle of peaceful use of outer space. It will exacerbate the risk of turning outer space into a battlefield and...

President Trump’s “Golden Dome” plan has riled the three countries whose weapons technology poses the greatest threat to American territory, with China, Russia and North Korea claiming the missile-defense project is driving a dangerous new arms race. -snip- North Korea slammed the Golden Dome on Tuesday as the “largest arms-buildup plan in history.” China and Russia in a joint statement earlier this month called the project “deeply destabilizing.” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, in a briefing to journalists Tuesday, said the plan “represented a direct disruption to the foundations of strategic stability.” All three countries have also denounced Trump’s...

CREDIT: NASA, ESA, STScI, Yuhan Yao (UC Berkeley); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI) ************************************************************** A traveling black hole stalking the cosmos for stellar prey recently revealed itself to NASA telescopes in a tidal disruption event (TDE), shredding and swallowing a star in a radioactive burst. With its brilliant flash, the TDE AT2024tvd lit up several observatories, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the NRAO Very Large Array. The TDE event took place 600 million light-years from Earth, allowing astronomers a new glimpse at black hole physics to be published in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal...

Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb', a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s. If there's one thing black holes are known for, it's their insatiable, inescapable gravity. Stuff goes into a black hole. From beyond the event horizon, this is, as far as we know, true. But from the space around a black hole, you might be able to get something. As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles. Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out...

In a landmark discovery, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a solitary stellar-mass black hole—an object with immense gravity, yet no visible companion, quietly roaming the depths of the Milky Way galaxy. Identified in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation, this black hole is believed to be around seven times more massive than our Sun and marks the first confirmed detection of a black hole not bound to another star. The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal and led by Kailash C. Sahu and colleagues at the Space Telescope Science Institute, relied on more than a decade of high-precision data...

This artist’s impression illustrates the mechanism that could be at the origin of the powerful bursts of X-ray light seen from a newly awakened black hole named Ansky. Credit: ESA A mysterious black hole in a distant galaxy just woke up after decades of silence—and it’s putting on a cosmic light show! **************************************************************************** ESA’s XMM-Newton and other X-ray telescopes are capturing massive bursts of energy known as quasiperiodic eruptions (QPEs) that defy current theories. Unlike anything seen before, these powerful flashes may be rewriting the rulebook on how black holes behave, evolve, and interact with their surroundings. XMM-Newton Observes Rare...

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have captured an amazing new photo of the spiral galaxy NGC 4941. This Hubble image shows NGC 4941, a spiral galaxy some 67 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo. The color image is composed of near-infrared, optical and ultraviolet observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Six filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / D. Thilker. ================================================================== NGC 4941 is located approximately 67 million light-years away...

The previous version of the deal was not signed because of a verbal spat between Vladimir Zelensky and US leaders at the White House MOSCOW, March 28. /TASS/. Ukraine will not recognize Washington’s military aid as a debt, Vladimir Zelensky said at a briefing. A new US-Ukraine draft agreement on natural agreements stipulates that Kiev should compensate for all the aid, which may exceed $120 bln, the European Pravda news outlet reported, citing a copy of the document. "Ukraine has received the new draft agreement on natural resources from the US, which is totally different from the previous framework agreement....

Galaxies observed by the JWST with those rotating one way circled in red, those rotating the other wat circled in blue (Image credit: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (2025)) ==================================================================================== Without a doubt, since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our view of the early universe, but its new findings could put astronomers in a spin. In fact, it could tell us something profound about the birth of the universe by possibly hinting that everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole. The $10 billion telescope, which began observing the cosmos...

A radical new theory suggests that black holes could transition into white holes, creating a location in space where time begins by ejecting material back into the cosmos. The theory also suggests a quantum mechanics link between black and white holes, including an aspect of enigmatic dark matter. The research team behind the new theory believes their work could represent a critical step toward reconciling quantum mechanics and gravity, potentially leading to new theories about the universe’s very nature. Black Holes (and White Holes) Have Long Fascinated Scientists First proposed by Albert Einstein, black holes have long fascinated scientists. Still,...

A groundbreaking reanalysis of the M87 galaxy’s supermassive black hole, M87*, unveils intriguing new insights into the structure and behavior of its plasma environment. Credit: EHT collaboration First Step on the Way to a Video of the Black Hole In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration made history by releasing the first-ever image of a black hole—M87*, located at the center of the galaxy M87. This groundbreaking image was based on data collected in 2017. Now, the EHT team has analyzed additional data from their 2018 observations, revealing new findings. The latest analysis shows that the brightest part of...

Astronomers have, for the first time, watched the moment a feeding supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy spat out a jet of material at one-third of the speed of light. Plus, the structure is technically made up of two jets, each about half a light-year across. The black hole in question, which has a mass around 1.4 billion times that of the sun, is located at the heart of a galaxy designated 1ES 1927+654. It's located about 270 million light-years away in the constellation Draco. "The launch of a black hole jet has never been observed...

The M87 Galaxy, as seen via the Hubble Space Telescope (NASA/Hubble). For the first time in a decade, the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy has erupted in an enormous gamma-ray flare, a rare and significant event that defied expectations in the latest analysis by astrophysicists. Several large collaborations, including the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), as well as the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope, and the MAGIC, VERITAS, HESS, and EAVN telescopes pooled their resources to observe the massive cosmic event, detailed in a new paper published in Astronomy and Astrophysics. M87 Black Hole Messier 87 is...

Webb Telescope observations reveal that supermassive black holes starve galaxies of star-forming gas, as seen in ‘Pablo’s Galaxy’, where high-speed gas expulsion by the black hole has ceased new star formation. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com ================================================================================= Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered that supermassive black holes can exhaust the resources necessary for star formation in their host galaxies, effectively starving them. This was observed in a galaxy similar in size to the Milky Way, located in the early universe. The discovery reveals that the black hole is actively preventing star formation by expelling essential star-forming gas at...

A recent study underscores the dynamic nature of black holes and extends similar thermodynamic characteristics to Extremely Compact Objects, advancing our comprehension of their behavior in quantum gravity scenarios.A paper titled "Universality of the thermodynamics of a quantum-mechanically radiating black hole departing from thermality," published in Physics Letters B highlights the importance of considering black holes as dynamical systems, where variations in their geometry during radiation emissions are critical to accurately describing their thermodynamic behavior.The study also suggests that extremely compact objects (ECOs) share these thermodynamic properties with black holes, regardless of their event horizon status. The significance of this...

Explanation: What glows there? The answer depends: sea or sky? In the sea, the unusual blue glow is bioluminescence. Specifically, the glimmer arises from Noctiluca scintillans, single-celled plankton stimulated by the lapping waves. The plankton use their glow to startle and illuminate predators. This mid-February display on an island in the Maldives was so intense that the astrophotographer described it as a turquoise wonderland. In the sky, by contrast, are the more familiar glows of stars and nebulas. The white band rising from the artificially-illuminated green plants is created by billions of stars in the central disk of our Milky...

Explanation: Globular star cluster Omega Centauri, also known as NGC 5139, is some 15,000 light-years away. The cluster is packed with about 10 million stars much older than the Sun within a volume about 150 light-years in diameter. It's the largest and brightest of 200 or so known globular clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way galaxy. Though most star clusters consist of stars with the same age and composition, the enigmatic Omega Cen exhibits the presence of different stellar populations with a spread of ages and chemical abundances. In fact, Omega Cen may be the remnant core...