It takes something as stupendous as the merger between two black holes to generate detectable gravitational waves. Here’s how such incredible cosmic objects form.
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Articles on Black holes
Displaying 101 - 120 of 135 articles
If you understand how a trampoline works, you’ll be able to understand what gravitational waves are.
It is the physics discovery of the century – even bigger than the Higgs Boson. Here’s how it happened and what it means, by a key member of one of the lead teams
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Tanya Hill speaks with Meg Urry about distant galaxies and the supermassive black holes that lurk in their centres.
A new study has failed to find evidence of gravitational waves, but that doesn’t mean Einstein was wrong about their existence.
The information paradox is one of the great mysteries in our understanding of black holes. But has the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking found the solution?
Meet the supermassive black hole that defied the model.
Black holes may not be the ferocious killers they are made out to be, suggests study.
Two white dwarfs found orbiting each other at the centre of a planetary nebula are now known to have enough mass that they will eventually trigger a special kind of supernova, according to research published…
A supermassive black hole has been found in an ultracompact dwarf galaxy – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive black hole. This finding, published today in Nature, suggests that supermassive…
Katherine Mack, astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne, answered questions posed by the public on Reddit. The Conversation has curated the highlights. Dark Matter How do you explain dark matter…
A black hole with extremely powerful jets has been found in the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83) by a team of Australian and American researchers, as we report in the journal Science today. Black holes are…
Over the past few days, the media has cried out the recent proclamation from Stephen Hawking that black holes, a mystery of both science and science fiction, do not exist. Such statements send social media…
While we tend to think of black holes as giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, it’s not all one-way travel. As gas falls in towards a black hole, it spirals gradually inwards like water going down a plug hole…
Galaxies may look pretty and delicate, with their swirls of stars of many colours - but don’t be fooled. At the heart of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, including in our own Milky Way. Black…
Matter escaping from the clutches of mysterious black holes may be responsible for forming stars, according to new research that explores how galaxies are formed. Much has been learnt about black holes…
Astronomers have measured the spin of a black hole buried in the heart of a galaxy located 56 million light years away, and discovered it was spinning quickly – about as quickly as it could go. That was…
Scientists in the US have successfully used a new NASA telescope to help improve our understanding of how black holes and galaxies evolve. Using data taken by the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array…
Australian researchers have redefined the relationship between galaxies and their black holes, showing that a widely-accepted method for calculating the mass of smaller black holes was wrong. The breakthrough…
Astronomers have discovered a new, enormous black hole that could change our understanding of how galaxies evolve. Holding the mass of 17 billion suns, the black hole at the centre of the NGC 1277 galaxy…
Top contributors
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Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
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Emeritus Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav, The University of Western Australia
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University Distinguished Professor of Astronomy, University of Arizona
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Professor, Curtin University
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Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics, Monash University
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Professor, University of Sydney
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Director of DAIM, University of Hull
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Senior Lecturer and ARC Future Fellow, Monash University
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Professor of Astronomy, Swinburne University of Technology
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Senior Curator (Astronomy), Museums Victoria and Honorary Fellow at University of Melbourne, Museums Victoria Research Institute
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Pro Vice-Chancellor Flagship Initiatives, Swinburne University of Technology
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Lecturer in Physics, Western Sydney University
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Associate Professor, Swinburne University of Technology, Swinburne University of Technology
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Professor, National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences
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ARC Laureate Fellow, Swinburne University of Technology
