Tag Archives: Hole

In one of the world’s most ambitious geoscience projects to date, Chinese engineers have begun drilling a 10,000-meter vertical borehole into the Earth’s crust. The operation, launched in May 2024, is located in the Tarim Basin, a desert region in northwest China’s Xinjiang province, known for its rich oil deposits and extreme climate. The goal isn’t just depth for depth’s …

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. Out there in the Universe, black holes abound. When two black holes merge, a significant portion of their mass can get converted into energy, in the form of gravitational waves, in one very short time interval. …

A team of astronomers has captured the most detailed image yet of a powerful jet blasting out from the supermassive black hole at the heart of blazar OJ 287, and what they found is extraordinary. The jet is severely bent, revealing compelling evidence that this object, located about four billion light-years away, could be part of the most extreme binary …

IN A NUTSHELL 🔭 Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope discovered that 60% of ancient galaxies rotate clockwise, challenging random rotation theories. 🌌 The bold hypothesis suggests the universe might be trapped within a massive black hole, redefining cosmic principles and space-time perceptions. 🔍 Alternative explanations, like observational bias from the Doppler effect, highlight the need for precise astronomical …

By all rights, they shouldn’t exist. When NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) first opened its eyes to the distant past, it spotted hundreds of tiny, brilliant objects glowing red in the infant universe — just 600 million years after the Big Bang. These “little red dots,” as astronomers came to call them, gleamed with such surprising brightness and density …

A beam of particles speeding away from the vicinity of a monstrous black hole has been found to be severely kinked, providing compelling evidence that the black hole is actually part of the most extreme binary system known. The black hole and its crooked jet are found in a blazar known as OJ 287, located about four billion light-years away. …

In a galaxy some 450 million light-years away, a brilliant flare of light revealed a probable black hole that suddenly woke from its slumber to snack on a passing star. This is not, in itself, a hugely unusual occurrence. The sting in this particular tail is the identity of the black hole in question: an elusive middleweight, or intermediate-mass black …

Astronomers think they have detected an extremely rare type of “missing link” black hole chowing down on a helpless star at the edge of a distant galaxy — and they’ve shared a stunning animation showing what this superbright stellar massacre may have looked like. Black holes come in a range of sizes, from primordial singularities smaller than the sun to …

IN A NUTSHELL 🔭 Researchers using the James Webb Space Telescope found a non-random rotational pattern in 263 ancient galaxies. 🌀 About 60% of these galaxies rotate clockwise, challenging previous beliefs about cosmic randomness. 🌌 The discovery has led to a hypothesis that the universe might be within a massive black hole, prompting a reevaluation of cosmic principles. 🔍 Alternative …

Astronomers have been left baffled by a cosmic discovery that defies longstanding theories about how stars interact with supermassive black holes. A powerful flare, linked to a star being torn apart by a black hole, was observed twice—two years apart—by a team of researchers led by Tel Aviv University. This phenomenon challenges current understandings of tidal disruption events and raises …