Pushing the boundary on ultralow frequency gravitational waves

A team of physicists has developed a method to detect gravity waves with such low frequencies that they could unlock the secrets behind the early phases of mergers between supermassive black holes, the heaviest objects in ...

Star ripped apart by black hole in rare discovery

Astronomers from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have uncovered the closest recorded occurrence of a star being torn apart by a supermassive black hole (SMBH). Using the All-Sky Automated Survey for ...

Webb unlocks secrets of primeval galaxy

Looking deep into space and time, two teams using the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope have studied the exceptionally luminous galaxy GN-z11, which existed when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only about 430 ...

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Black hole

In general relativity, a black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, including light, can escape its pull. The black hole has a one-way surface, called an event horizon, into which objects can fall, but out of which nothing can come. It is called "black" because it absorbs all the light that hits it, reflecting nothing, just like a perfect blackbody in thermodynamics. Quantum analysis of black holes shows them to possess a temperature and Hawking radiation.

Despite its invisible interior, a black hole can reveal its presence through interaction with other matter. A black hole can be inferred by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit a region in space which looks empty. Alternatively, one can see gas falling into a relatively small black hole, from a companion star. This gas spirals inward, heating up to very high temperature and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and earth-orbiting telescopes. Such observations have resulted in the scientific consensus that, barring a breakdown in our understanding of nature, black holes do exist in our universe.

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