Lifeboat Foundation

Dr Alexander Tchekhovskoy from the University of California, Berkeley and Dr Omer Bromberg from Hebrew University came up with a simulation demonstrating the powerful jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centres of the largest galaxies.

The simulation explains why some black holes burst forth as bright beacons visible across the universe, while others fall apart and never pierce the halo of the galaxy.

Continue reading “The black hole jets that ‘punch’ out of their galaxies” »

Physicists have come up with a new way to predict what lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole, and it could give us a more accurate idea of their mysterious internal structures.

Thanks to the first — and now second — direct observation of gravitational waves emanating from what scientists think are black hole mergers, we’re starting to get our first real evidence that black holes do actually exist in reality, not just theory.

But even if we can prove they really do physically exist, there’s no getting around the fact that, thanks to their enormous gravitational pull, black holes swallow up anything that falls beyond their event horizon.

Continue reading “Physicists say they’ve figured out how to ‘see’ inside a black hole” »

When an astronomical observatory detected two black holes colliding in deep space, scientists celebrated confirmation of Einstein’s prediction of gravitational waves. A team of astrophysicists wondered something else: Had the experiment found the “dark matter” that makes up most of the mass of the universe?

The eight scientists from the Johns Hopkins Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy had already started making calculations when the discovery by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was announced in February. Their results, published recently in Physical Review Letters, unfold as a hypothesis suggesting a solution for an abiding mystery in astrophysics.

“We consider the possibility that the black hole binary detected by LIGO may be a signature of dark matter,” wrote the scientists in their summary, referring to the black hole pair as a “binary.” What follows are five pages of annotated mathematical equations showing how the researchers considered the mass of the two objects LIGO detected as a point of departure, suggesting that these objects could be part of the mysterious substance known to make up about 85 percent of the mass of the universe.

Scientists have seen two black holes crash into each other and merge for the second time, proving Albert Einstein was right and showing the first observation was no fluke.

Ultra-sensitive instruments called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected the ripple in gravitational waves that came across space and time to Earth last December, the team reported Wednesday.

LIGO detects gravitational waves for the second time, from another pair of merging black holes. This time they were smaller and provided a longer-duration signal of their final moments. Two events within four months suggests that such detections will soon be giving astronomers a wealth of new information about previously invisible events in the Universe.

“A prototype system, designed as a test for a planned array of 5,000 galaxy-seeking robots, is taking shape at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).”

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Objects may be able to pass through a wormhole at the centre of a black hole despite extreme forces.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR), black holes are ferocious beasts able to swallow and destroy everything within their reach. Their strong gravitational pull deforms the space-time causal structure in such a way that nothing can get out of them once their event horizon is crossed. The fate of those incautious observers curious enough to cross this border is to suffer a painful spaghettification process due to the strong tidal forces before being destroyed at the center of the black hole.

For those who missed my 2014 review of E.O. Wilson’s book, “The Meaning of Human Existence.”

With a title as audacious as “The Meaning of Human Existence,” even a casual reader couldn’t be faulted for expecting a veritable Rosetta Stone to the cosmos and life as we know it. But in his latest book, Edward O. Wilson offers no philosophically-satisfying answers to this age-old “existence” question. And maybe that’s his point.

After all, the ability to ponder our own existence is at once a blessing and a curse. Neither sharks nor swallows seem to worry about too much more than their next meal. Yet in fifteen chapters, Wilson — a renowned biologist, naturalist, author and Harvard University professor emeritus, strips humanity of its soul.

Continue reading “E.O. Wilson Chases The ‘Great Riddle’ Of Human Existence” »