Science fiction doesn’t exist to make movies about the stuff we know about—it explores the unknown physics, astronomy, biology and chemistry where real uncertainty about topics can lead to compelling, believable stories. That’s what makes black holes such a popular subject; light can’t escape them, maybe they’re…
Should you find yourself inside a black hole, you will die. Should you find yourself near a black hole, you will also die. Aside from the fact that these massive, light-trapping monsters are impossible to reach on human timescales, there are simply not many ways to measure the plasma surrounding them without dying or…
“I don’t know!” is among the most scientific phrases you can utter. “I don’t know” is the reason you do science, after all. “I don’t know” means more funding, more jobs, more mysteries, and ultimately, more “now I knows.” Astronomers have now uncovered an “I don’t know” that might become an important tool to study…
Last year’s gravitational wave discovery may have felt like the end of an era—a momentous occasion in which a precise experiment finally ended a hundred-year search to confirm a baffling prediction made by Albert Einstein. The discovery, instead, spawned an entirely new field of astronomy, and the results are finally…
If you were to rank the wildest things in the universe, there are a few obvious contenders: gamma rays, fast radio bursts, and quasars, for example. But no list would be complete without black holes and the black hole’s less-dense cousins, the neutron star. These hyper-compressed things can do some mind-boggling…
You think our galaxy is special? Ha. Our boring pinwheel of gas and dark matter might be a nice hangout for humans. But 750 or so million light years away, there’s an elliptical galaxy, Galaxy 0402+379, whose two supermassive black holes are orbiting each other from a distance of only 24 or so light years. Their…
Some Earthlings have the silly tendency to think that if they don’t understand something, it must be fake. That includes our influence on the changing climate, the fact that the Earth is round, and the existence of black holes, massive blobs so dense that not even light can escape their tug.
The past few years have been incredible for physics discoveries. Scientists spotted the Higgs boson, a particle they’d been hunting for almost 50 years, in 2012, and gravitational waves, which were theorized 100 years ago, in 2016. This year, they’re slated to take a picture of a black hole. So, thought some…
We don’t understand quasars all that well, but are pretty certain that these incredibly bright lights belong in the centers of galaxies. So it looked a little weird when astronomers spotted quasar 3C 186 thirty six thousand light years away from the center of its galaxy, seemingly trying to escape.
Black holes may be one of the universe’s most bizarre phenomena. They’re literally divide-by-zeros in the sky, places where the mathematics of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity falls apart. These dense behemoths have such strong gravitational fields that time stops, and all futures point directly at the…
It’s no secret that supermassive black holes are heartless beasts: These objects of immense gravity that let nothing, not even light escape, have fascinated astronomers since the early 20th century. While it’s believed that so-called supermassive black holes lurk at the center of most galaxies, including our own,…
Let me tell you a little something about gravity: It’s weird. A hundred or so years ago, Albert Einstein realized Isaac Newton’s laws didn’t work so well for really extreme situations, ones Newton never would have encountered on 17th century Earth. So Einstein said, alright, let’s come up with a new theory that looks…
Don’t get me wrong, black holes are cool but they’re also giant voids of terror: These gravitational abysses have been known to snack on stars in occurrences called Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs). It’s always the same horror story—an unsuspecting star wanders too close to a black hole, only to get ripped apart by the…
A flan-obsessed astronaut named Dave and his new partner, a highly intelligent seedless melon, head to Mars in Black Holes, an irreverent (and mildly NSFW) 3D animated short. Its makers, Noodles Studio, hope to develop the story into an adult animated sitcom via a just-launched Kickstarter.
To prevent massive dams from overflowing when heavy rains cause water levels to rise, spillways like this are used to drain water to the stream below. Without a true sense of scale, it looks just like the drain in your bathtub, but from a drone’s bird’s eye view, the opening to this spillway looks more like a black…
A typical lunch outing with friends lasts about an hour-and-a-half. If it’s bottomless brunch, maybe tack on a few more hours. But supermassive black holes don’t care for our human constructions of time—it turns out they’ll eat for a decade if they choose.
Black holes are the strong, silent type—an age-old enigma. Hubble estimates that there are roughly 100 million black holes in our galaxy alone, but because their gravitational pull is so intense, light can’t escape. So even with the most advanced equipment,“stray” black holes wandering in space are nearly impossible…
Last week, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson held a press event to announce the museum’s new Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation.
Two billion light years away, two clusters of galaxies are colliding in an intergalactic pileup. As black holes interact with the gas inside the collision, the mass has turned into an enormous particle launcher, spewing some of the universe’s highest-energy stuff.
Stare into the abyss, my friends. The image above features the highest concentration of black holes humans have ever seen. So dense are the merciless chasms of darkness at the center of this map, you could pack 5,000 of them into a patch of sky the size of the full moon.
