While we can’t see inside a black hole, we can spot the intensely bright glowing disc that surrounds one. Now, we might better understand why these discs appear to ‘twinkle’.
Solutions to Einstein’s famous equations back in the 20th century describe ‘wormholes,’ or tunnels through space-time.
Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library via GettyImages
An astrophysicist explains what wormholes are and how these theoretical space-time tunnels have popped up in the solutions to a set of decadesold equations.
The Milky Way above a single MeerKAT antenna in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Inset: EHT image of the Milky Way black hole.
SARAO, EHT
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
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.
Rotating black holes suck up anything that gets near enough.
muratart/shutterstock
A spinning black hole is pumping vast amounts of energy back into the surrounding universe, but something is causing the jets that transport that energy to wobble very rapidly.
The first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of galaxy Messier 87 and its shadow.
EHT Collaboration
Astronomers say they have “seen what we thought was unseeable” in releasing the first image of a supermassive black hole. So how did we get to this historic observation?
The cow erupted near a galaxy known as CGCG 137-068, marked by the yellow cross.
Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey
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
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.
The famous cosmologist was closely identified with black holes due to his revolutionary theoretical work explaining some of their mysterious properties.
An artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Black holes may come in many sizes, but there’s still a gap in the middle. The hunt is on to solve the mystery of where are the intermediate size black holes.