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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A sudden flare and cooling of gas around a black hole has enabled astronomers to measure the magnetic field of a black hole for the first time – finding it much weaker than expected.
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.