The center of the Milky Way galaxy is somewhere you wouldn’t want to be. We have it pretty easy here on Earth, orbiting our star and staying out of everyone’s way, but deep within the heart of our galaxy, a monster lurks. It’s a supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* (that’s pronounced “A star”, …
After years of work and a whole lot of hype, researchers working with the Event Horizon Telescope project finally unveiled the very first image ever captured of an actual black hole this week. The relatively low-res image was nonetheless fantastic, and the fact that scientists were able to capture an image of the black hole …
As we expected, the international collaboration of scientists involved in the Event Horizon Telescope project have made good on their promise to provide the first-ever visual evidence of a black hole. At a conference today, which was held simultaneously in several countries and in multiple languages, researchers revealed their findings to the world. What we …
Well, the day is finally here. After centuries of wondering and developing technology capable of actually spotting a black hole, the international group of researchers that make up the Event Horizon Telescope project are ready to unveil their findings to the world. Thankfully, the scientists know how big of a deal this is and have …
For how much astronomers know about black holes — it’s a lot, trust me — it’s a bit of a shock that mankind has never actually seen one. Everything science knows about black holes is based on inference rather than actually witnessing one with our own eyes (electronic or otherwise), but that may be about …
Black holes are so strange that they’re kind of hard to wrap your brain around. They’re super-dense objects with gravitational pull so strong that nothing can escape them and, while we know they exist, astronomers have never actually photographed one. Weird, right? When it comes to spotting a black hole the distance is really what …
Black holes are some of the most interesting features of our universe, but they’re also not very well understood. Studying distant black holes in any great detail is very difficult due to the fact that nothing, including light, can escape their grasp once its gets too close. Now, a black hole sitting some 290 million …
Black holes are scary. They’re like bottomless pits that nothing can escape from, even light, and you probably wouldn’t want to get too close to one. Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is thought to feature a supermassive black hole at its center. at a point known as Sagittarius A*, and thanks to the wonders …
What happens when a star dies? When most stars exhaust their bountiful supply of energy they enter a state where they become white dwarfs. These dead stars are no longer able to produce fusion reactions. They are incredibly dense, but they put out only a very small amount of light due to the energy left …
Albert Einstein dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge, even if he couldn’t always prove that his theories made sense. Many of the things that Einstein wrote about during his life couldn’t even be tested with the technology that existed at the time, which means we’re still trying to figure out just how right …
