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Articles on Black holes

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Mating laser-driven atomic clocks like the one shown here with microwaves promises more accurate electronic devices. N. Phillips/NIST

Pairing lasers with microwaves makes mind-bogglingly accurate electronic clocks – a potential boon for GPS, cell phones and radar

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.
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

Curious Kids: can Earth be affected by a black hole in the future?

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.
Feel like traveling to another dimension? Better choose your black hole wisely. Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock.com

Rotating black holes may serve as gentle portals for hyperspace travel

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.
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.
Technicians prepare Swift’s UVOT for vibration testing on Aug. 1, 2002, more than two years before launch, in the High Bay Clean Room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

Swift’s telescope reveals birth, deaths and collisions of stars through 1 million snapshots in UV

The Swift Observatory passed a milestone: 1 million snapshots of the universe. These exquisite and revealing pictures have captured the births and deaths of stars, gravitational waves and comets.

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