A long time ago, in two galaxies about 900 million light-years away, two black holes each gobbled up their neutron star companions, triggering gravitational waves that finally hit Earth in January 2020.
Astronomy
Jun 29, 2021
28
640
At the center of most galaxies are black holes so massive—up to several billion times the mass of our sun—that they have earned the descriptor "supermassive." Compare this to your run-of-the-mill stellar-mass black hole, ...
Astronomy
May 25, 2021
1
10
In 2017, astronomers witnessed the birth of a black hole for the first time. Gravitational wave detectors picked up the ripples in spacetime caused by two neutron stars colliding to form the black hole, and other telescopes ...
General Physics
Feb 16, 2021
5
359
Fermilab scientists have been conducting experiments to look for quantum fluctuations of space and time at the smallest scale imaginable according to known physics. At this limit, the Planck length, our classical notions ...
Quantum Physics
Feb 15, 2021
6
348
When three galaxies collide, what happens to the huge black holes at the centers of each? A new study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and several other telescopes reveals new information about how many black holes ...
Astronomy
Jan 14, 2021
1
313
Scientists have used a "galaxy-sized" space observatory to find possible hints of a unique signal from gravitational waves, or the powerful ripples that course through the universe and warp the fabric of space and time itself.
Astronomy
Jan 11, 2021
2
4906
The giant, aging cables that support one of the world's largest single-dish radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, pushing an observatory renowned for its key role in astronomical discoveries to the ...
Space Exploration
Nov 15, 2020
0
46
The properties of quantum states of light are already leveraged by such highly sophisticated leading-edge technologies as those of the latest sensitivity upgrades to LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, ...
Optics & Photonics
Nov 12, 2020
0
18
Solving the equations of general relativity for colliding black holes is no simple matter.
Astronomy
Nov 6, 2020
3
1389
It's been three years since the landmark detection of a neutron star merger from gravitational waves. And since that day, an international team of researchers led by University of Maryland astronomer Eleonora Troja has been ...
Astronomy
Oct 12, 2020
8
246
