Black Holes

What is dark matter made of? It’s one of the most perplexing questions of modern astronomy. We know that dark matter is out there, since we can see its obvious gravitational influence on everything from galaxies to the evolution of the entire universe, but we don’t know what it is. Our best guess is that…

A new signal detected by LIGO/Virgo may be the so-called ‘holy grail’ of astrophysics: the merger of a neutron star and a black hole. They’ve discovered pairs of black holes merging, and pairs of neutron stars merging, but until now, not a neutron star-black hole pair. “I think we’re opening a window on the universe.”…

Black holes, those beguiling singularities that sit on the precipice of the known and the unknown, keep surprising us with their behaviour. As organizations like the Event Horizon Telescope have made clear, there’s a lot we don’t know about the holes, and worse than that, we don’t even know how much we don’t know. Now…

Special Relativity. It’s been the bane of space explorers, futurists and science fiction authors since Albert Einstein first proposed it in 1905. For those of us who dream of humans one-day becoming an interstellar species, this scientific fact is like a wet blanket. Luckily, there are a few theoretical concepts that have been proposed that…

“We have taken the first picture of a black hole.” EHT project director Sheperd S. Doeleman of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. What was once un-seeable can now be seen. Black holes, those difficult-to-understand singularities that may reside at the center of every galaxy, are becoming seeable. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)…

Enlarge / The first image of the environment around a black hole. As a matter of fact, it's not all dark. National Science Foundation Two years ago, telescopes around the world turned their attention to two supermassive black holes. Now, after a massive computational effort, their data has been combined in a way that allowed…

For over fifty years, scientists have theorized that roughly 85% of matter in the Universe’s is made up of a mysterious, invisible mass. Since then, multiple observation campaigns have indirectly witnessed the effects that this “Dark Matter” has on the Universe. Unfortunately, all attempts to detect it so far have failed, leading scientists to propose…

Enlarge / 19th-century etching of a telescope in use. Much of the Universe behaves as if there's more matter there than we can see. Dark matter explains this by positing that there's matter present that we can't see, and evidence has piled up in favor of this idea. In contrast, evidence for the identify of…

Every once in a while, the Milky Way ejects a star. The evicted star is typically ejected from the chaotic area at the center of the galaxy, where our Super Massive Black Hole (SMBH) lives. But at least one of them was ejected from the comparatively calm galactic disk, a discovery that has astronomers rethinking…

The idea of one day traveling to another star system and seeing what is there has been the fevered dream of people long before the first rockets and astronauts were sent to space. But despite all the progress we have made since the beginning of the Space Age, interstellar travel remains just that – a…