black holes
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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…
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Hear the Sound of a Black Hole ‘Echo’
Using a new tool they nicknamed the “Reverberation Machine,” researchers have detected eight echoing black hole binaries in the Milky Way. They then converted those X-ray echoes into sound waves, which you can listen to in the video below.
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Black Holes Could Be Expanding Along With the Universe
In 2015, two black holes were caught merging when the ripples in spacetime they created were detected on Earth. Since then, gravitational wave detectors have found many more of these mergers, broadening our understanding of the most epic collisions known to science. Now, a team of astrophysicists examining data from these detections are proposing that…
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Physicists Think They have Spotted a Very Rare Black Hole
On August 30, 1995, 10-billion-year-old light from the early universe finally hit the Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, which was circling in Earth orbit. An Australian research team is now reporting that the gamma-ray burst contained evidence of an exceedingly rare intermediate-mass black hole, the sort that would help fill a hole in our understanding of these…