CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Scientists have detected a black hole that’s taken a record-breaking decade to devour a star — and it’s still chewing away. The food fest is happening in a small galaxy 1.8 billion light-years from Earth. University of New Hampshire research scientist Dacheng Lin said that black hole feeding frenzies have been observed since the 1990s, but they’ve lasted just a year. At 11 years and counting, this is the longest known one yet. Lin and his team used data from orbiting X-ray telescopes to study the monstrous munching. X-ray flares erupt when a star gets swallowed by a black hole and cooked millions of degrees. Black holes clearly like their stars well done. “We have witnessed a star’s spectacular and prolonged demise,” Lin said in a statement. The X-rays coming from this black hole surpass expectations in another way. “For most of the time we’ve been looking at this object, it has been … [Read more...] about CBS News Logo Black hole has taken a record-breaking decade to devour a star
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CBS News Logo Star’s death dive into black hole mapped by NASA satellite
A star’s long-ago death dive into a black hole generated cosmic fireworks that are revealing more and more about the dramatic encounter. The star got too close to its galaxy’s central black hole about 290 million years ago, and collisions among its torn-apart pieces caused an eruption of optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light that was first spotted by scientists in 2014. Fresh observations of this radiation by NASA’s Swift telescope have yielded more details about where these different wavelengths were generated in the event, which is called ASASSN-14li, a new study reports. [The Stranges Black Holes in the Universe] “We discovered brightness changes in X-rays that occurred about a month after similar changes were observed in visible and UV light,” study lead author Dheeraj Pasham, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a NASA statement. “We think this means the optical and UV emission arose far … [Read more...] about CBS News Logo Star’s death dive into black hole mapped by NASA satellite
CBS News Logo Colliding black holes send gravitational waves rippling through space
Three billion years ago, in a third of a second, two black holes crashed into each other and merged into a single entity, converting two solar masses into energy that shook the fabric of spacetime, sending gravitational ripples across the universe that were detected on Earth last January, researchers announced Thursday. It was the third confirmed detection of coalescing black holes detected so far by the U.S.-led Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, a project made up of two observing stations, one near Hanford, Washington, and the other 1,800 miles away near Livingston, Louisiana, and hundreds of scientists around the world. The observations confirmed a prediction first made by Albert Einstein a century earlier. As the gravitational waves passed by, they caused space to lengthen in one direction and compress in the other, squeezing and stretching the LIGO detectors ever so slightly and causing laser beams to cover slightly different distances as they … [Read more...] about CBS News Logo Colliding black holes send gravitational waves rippling through space
How Stephen Hawking transformed our understanding of black holes
An artist’s illustration of a supermassive black hole ever discovered. (Robin Dienel, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science) There's a lot we still don't know about black holes, but these light-gobbling behemoths would be even more mysterious if Stephen Hawking hadn't plumbed their inky depths. For starters, the famed cosmologist, who died yesterday (March 14) at the age of 76, helped give more solid mathematical backing to the concept of black holes, the existence of which was predicted by Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity. "Hawking actually proved some rigorous mathematical theorems about Einstein's equations for gravity that showed that, under quite general circumstances, there were places where the equations broke down — what are called singularities," said Tom Banks, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in New Jersey. "And, in particular, the region inside of a black hole … [Read more...] about How Stephen Hawking transformed our understanding of black holes
My friend Linnemann adds surviving ‘Black Hole’ to his adventures
My friend Tom Linnemann grew up in north Melrose and an adventure was to get on a bike and check out what the roughnecks were doing on the south side. He played quarterback successfully at St. John’s and then set out to continue an interesting existence. Fortunately, he found a bride named Danica who should be beatified by now on the way to sainthood. She wasn’t on the trip with Tom and a friend as they visited areas of the Philippines, including an evening of watching small-person boxing matches. “It seemed to be a very popular activity, with much wagering within the crowd,’’ Linnemann said. "I didn’t have the money figured out, so I didn’t know if I was winning or losing bets.’’ Danica was the companion for my favorite yarn from the Linnemann travels: They were visiting Vietnam and Cambodia in January 2010. They were at Angkor Wat, the largest religious monument in the world, in northwestern Cambodia on the weekend of Jan. 23-24. … [Read more...] about My friend Linnemann adds surviving ‘Black Hole’ to his adventures