Tag: black hole

By David GrimmDec.For those of you looking for a pandemic break, here are some of our most popular non–COVID-19 stories of the year, along with some personal favorites—almost all of them stories w

Ghez, a professor at UCLA, and Reinhard Genzel, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley, share half the prize for the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.“What Andrea G

Discoveries about the cosmos and ancient life on Earth tantalized scientists and the public in 2020.For the first time, astronomers may have glimpsed a fast radio burst in the Milky Way.Even more int

From the biggest merger of black holes to the world’s oldest string — fashioned by Neandertals, no less — discoveries in 2020 set new records that amazed and inspired.The new material allows cu

Science News drew over 22 million visitors to our website this year.Here’s a recap of the other most-read news stories and long reads of 2020.Scientists analyzed billions of cells from two people w

A group of scientists from Columbia University recently published a paper detailing how humanity could power an off-Earth colony by tapping into one of the universe’s largest and most powerful reso

This active supermassive black hole, or quasar, boasts a mass of 1.But astronomer Feige Wang of the University of Arizona and colleagues calculated that even if J0313-1806’s seed formed right after

At the center of the Milky Way lies the biggest object we can be sure exists: a supermassive black hole (SMBH) four million times more massive than the sun.They say, under the right conditions, black

Supermassive objects such as black holes and neutron stars warp spacetime around them, and interactions between these bodies can result in the formation of gravitational waves, similar to ripples in a

Identical twins have nothing on black holes.“In classical general relativity, they would be exactly identical,” said Paul Chesler, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University.And as far as we kn