black holes
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Nesting Doll Stars Proposed as Solution to General Relativity
If you asked an astrophysicist what is yet to be discovered in the universe, there’s a good chance they’d paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld: It’s full of known unknowns. Besides the regular matter and energy we know and love, the universe is also composed of two big mysteries: dark energy and dark matter. Theoretical astrophysicists aim to…
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Mystery Object in Deep Space Is Confounding Astronomers
The super-dense object doesn’t quite fit with what we know about black holes or neutron stars.
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Meet the ‘Event Horizon Explorer’, Which Aims to See Light Rings Around Black Holes
Astronomers transfixed the public in April 2019 when they released the first-ever image of a black hole, produced by radio wave data from a collaboration of telescopes around the world known collectively as the Event Horizon Telescope. Now, a team of physicists and researchers have developed the plans for the successor to that project: a…
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Why Do Black Holes Twinkle?
Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself. And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing…