A small add-on to existing gravitational wave detectors could reveal what happens to matter as it becomes a black hole, a process like the big bang in reverse.
Dr Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin / ICRAR) and The GLEAM Team
Some of the baby radio galaxies found may not be ‘babies’ at all. Rather, they may be ‘angsty teens’, rapidly growing into adults much faster than researchers had anticipated.
Could we travel to other universes using wormholes?
ktsdesign/Shutterstock
Roger Penrose helped resurrect Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez showed there was a black hole in the middle of our galaxy.
Artist impression of merging black holes.
Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav)
Researchers have made some of the most accurate clocks imaginable in recent years, but the trick is harnessing those clocks to electronics. Using lasers to tune microwaves bridges the gap.
Like a cosmic butterfly in the sky, radio galaxy PKS 2014-55 was observed by CSIRO researchers with the Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope.
A recently discovered black hole – found by the way it makes a nearby star wobble – is hard to square with our understanding of how these dark cosmic objects form.
NAOC, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Astronomers using a new technique to hunt black holes found one 70 times as heavy as the Sun
Another reason you don’t want to get too close to a black hole is because of something we call ‘spaghettification’. If this happened to Earth it would be… unpleasant.
Shutterstock
If you got too close to a black hole, it would suck you in and you’d never be able to escape, even if you were travelling at the speed of light.
This point of no return is called the event horizon.
Artist’s impression of the accretion disk and jets in the black hole system V404 Cygni.
ICRAR
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?
Finally dragged out of the shadows.
Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration /
Feel like visiting another star system or dimension? You can do this by traveling through a spacetime portal of a black hole. But you better choose carefully. All black holes are not created equal.
The crucial phase of our discovery of black holes took place in a suitably dark period of human history – World War II.
The region around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, imaged with South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope.
South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO)
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.
Artist impression of Abell 2597.
NRAO AUI NSF D Berry