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Articles on Black hole

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A person falling into a black hole and being stretched while approaching the black hole’s horizon. Leo Rodriguez and Shanshan Rodriguez

Could a human enter a black hole to study it?

If you are a sci-fi junkie you’ve probably wondered what would happen if you were unlucky enough to fall into a black hole. How well you’d fare all depends on the type of black hole.
A black hole is an object so compact that nothing can escape its gravitational pull, not even light. They are formed when stars die and start collapsing under their own weight. Deep inside the black hole resides an infinitely hot and dense object, a so-called, singularity. Science Photo Library - MARK GARLICK/Getty Images

2020 Nobel Prize in physics awarded for work on black holes – an astrophysicist explains the trailblazing discoveries

The 2020 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three scientists – an Englishman, an American and a German – for breakthroughs in understanding the most mysterious objects in the universe: black holes.
Ripples in space-time caused by massive events such this artist rendition of a pair of merging neutron stars. Carl Knox, OzGrav

New detections of gravitational waves brings the number to 11 – so far

More ripples in space-time have been detected from merging pairs of black holes, one of which was the most massive and distant gravitational-wave source ever observed.
An artist’s impression of the path of star S2 as it passes very close to the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. The very strong gravitational field causes the colour of the star to shift slightly to the red. (Size and colour exaggerated for clarity.) ESO/M. Kornmesser

Einstein’s theory of gravity tested by a star speeding past a supermassive black hole

Astronomers traced a single star as it passed close to the black hole at the centre of our galaxy, and detected the telltale signature of Einstein’s gravity in action.
A simulation of the latest binary black hole merger detected by LIGO. Blue indicates weak fields and yellow indicates strong fields. Numerical-relativistic Simulation: S Ossokine, A Buonanno (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics) and the Simulating eXtreme Spacetime project Scientific Visualization: T Dietrich (Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics), R Haas (NCSA)

A new discovery of gravitational waves has black holes in a spin

Scientists have made a third detection of gravitational waves, again caused by the merger of two black holes. But they think there’s something different about the black holes in this case.
An artist’s impression of a Sun-like star close to a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole, with a mass of about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. ESA/Hubble, ESO, M. Kornmesser

Black holes are even stranger than you can imagine

The discovery of a new black hole adds to our understanding of these celestial objects that fascinate in both fact and fiction.

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