All posts tagged: hole

This physicist is hunting for the biggest black hole in the universe

This physicist is hunting for the biggest black hole in the universe

Published by skeptic

No black hole could ever be described as small. Even the most diminutive are many times the mass of the sun. But there is a now talk of a variety that throws shade on all others: the stupendously large black holes, otherwise known as SLABs. These dark monsters could be as massive as whole galaxies or even bigger. The idea of SLABs first cropped up a few years ago, partly as a by-product of astronomers’ desperation to unmask dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up 85 per cent of all matter in the universe. Since then, they have looked for SLABs by trying to detect the light they would emit or the way they would bend space-time. But earlier this year, astronomer Brian Lacki at the Breakthrough Listen project based at the University of Oxford proposed another way to detect SLABs, which involves searching for the shadows they cast on the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the light released just after the big bang that now suffuses the whole universe. New Scientist spoke with Lacki …

Toy Story 5 Sneakily Addressed A Decades-Long Plot Hole

Toy Story 5 Sneakily Addressed A Decades-Long Plot Hole

Published by Sam Flores

!function(n){if(!window.cnx){window.cnx={},window.cnx.cmd=[];var t=n.createElement(‘iframe’);t.display=’none’,t.onload=function(){var n=t.contentWindow.document,c=n.createElement(‘script’);c.src=”//cd.connatix.com/connatix.player.js”,c.setAttribute(‘async’,’1′),c.setAttribute(‘type’,’text/javascript’),n.body.appendChild(c)},n.head.appendChild(t)}}(document);(new Image()).src=”https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=8b034f64-513c-4987-b16f-42d6008f7feb”;cnx.cmd.push(function(){cnx({“playerId”:”8b034f64-513c-4987-b16f-42d6008f7feb”,”mediaId”:”99490c2d-13c1-487f-a4a2-eccb588295ec”}).render(“6a4264c5e4b0d6c25f519eae”);}); Though it seems to have divided critics, Toy Story 5 has proven an undeniable box office success. It’s achieved the franchise’s biggest ever opening weekend, raking in over £227 million in the two-day stretch.  We loved the new installment – entertainment editor Daniel Welsh described it as “a return to form for the beloved animated series [and] for Pixar in general, after a hit-and-miss run for the once-untouchable studio”. And as ScreenRant pointed out, the movie should satisfy long-standing viewers on another front too: it addressed a decades-long plot hole. Buzz Lightyear doesn’t know he’s a toy for much of the first 1995 Toy Story movie. He truly believes he’s a Space Ranger and tries to contact his Space Command.  But that leaves a problem fans have previously pointed out on sites like Reddit: if Buzz doesn’t think he’s a toy, why does he freeze when Andy (the human owner of the toys) enters a room he’s also in? All the other toys stop moving and talking whenever a person can see them, presumably so …

Black hole collision lets scientists probe the event horizon for the first time

Black hole collision lets scientists probe the event horizon for the first time

Published by Jenni Sidey

Black holes do their most important work in hiding. The boundary that defines them, the event horizon, seals off anything that crosses it from the rest of the universe. Yet in a violent collision recorded last year, astronomers say they have finally caught a signal from the brink of that boundary itself. It came just before it vanished for good. Using the loudest black hole merger ever detected, a team led by researchers at the Australian National University pulled out what they describe as the last part of the crash still able to reach distant observers. The signal came from two black holes that spiraled together, merged, and formed a larger remnant. Hidden inside the gravitational-wave data was a faint component the team calls a direct wave. Notably, this feature appears to carry information from extremely close to the newly formed black hole’s horizon. That matters because the event horizon is one of the hardest places in the universe to study. Light cannot escape from inside it, and even the familiar images of black holes, …

Behold, the most realistic golf game ever – it took me 428 strokes to finish a hole | Games

Behold, the most realistic golf game ever – it took me 428 strokes to finish a hole | Games

Published by Sam Flores

I have always struggled playing golf. I wish I didn’t. It’s a beautiful game in concept. A leisurely walk in the sunshine, slapping a ball around, sandwiches and beer consumed during and after play. Sure, you have to dress like Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch, and getting membership of an actual club is more complex than joining the Freemasons (although many offer a two for one deal with this), but you don’t have to be fit, you don’t have to even run. It is the only outdoor sport where a fat dad can be the best in the world. The premise couldn’t be simpler: get the ball in the hole. But there is nothing worse in sport than knowing what you have to do and not being able to do it. Just ask amateur parachutists. It is this gap between what I want to do and my inability to do it that makes me angry when I play. And you cannot play golf angry. The only times I have ever finished a round of …

Hidden black hole could explain mystery at the heart of our galaxy

Hidden black hole could explain mystery at the heart of our galaxy

Published by skeptic

Bright flares are visible near the event horizon of Sagittarius A* Photo by NASA/CXC/MIT/F.K.Baganoff/Getty Images The centre of our galaxy is a strange and chaotic place, but we may finally have an explanation for the unusual stars that orbit there. Our supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is surrounded by three populations of stars, all strikingly different from one another but with similar ages, and researchers have come up with a relatively simple model that can explain all of them at once. The closest objects to Sagittarius A* are called S-stars: a spherical swarm of stars, many of which are on elongated orbits that take them dangerously close to the black hole. Their distribution also has a strange, unexplained gap called a zone of avoidance. The next layer contains clockwise disc stars, which are massive stars that sit in a relatively orderly disc outside the orbits of the S-stars. Finally, there are the off-disc stars, which are on more scattered orbits, including some that appear to circle in the opposite direction from the rest. There have …

The Eternal Allure of the Rabbit Hole

The Eternal Allure of the Rabbit Hole

Published by Daniella Wilson

Sylvia Meagher was 44 years old in the fall of 1965 and lived alone, except for her cat, Allegra, named after the ballet dancer Allegra Kent. She commuted from her one-bedroom apartment in the West Village to the United Nations, where she’d been working for nearly two decades at the World Health Organization. Although Meagher was a bureaucrat, her sensibilities were bohemian. She was acquainted with many of the painters, musicians, and writers who lived near her. In her foyer, Meagher displayed a painting of a nude figure given to her by a neighbor, the expressionist Alexander Dobkin. But the focal point of her living space was a bookcase laden with 26 reference volumes bound in dark-blue cloth. These were the supplemental materials of the Warren Commission Report. Only a few hundred private citizens in the United States purchased a copy of the 18,000-page, 54-pound series as soon as the Government Printing Office made it available. Far fewer had read it end to end. Perhaps only Meagher had nearly memorized it. Released in September 1964, …

Pump.Fun’s Bounties Platform Is a Black Hole of Circular Grifting

Pump.Fun’s Bounties Platform Is a Black Hole of Circular Grifting

Published by skeptic

Would you run into a crowded university lecture hall, fart into a megaphone, and bellow “fartcoin” at the top of your lungs? If so—and should you have the means to document this stunt on video, preferably capturing the audience’s reaction—you may claim a reward of approximately $1,000. The money, of course, will be dispensed in fartcoin, a meme cryptocurrency trading at a little over 10 cents at time of publication, with a total market capitalization hovering around $130 million. Such is the promise of Pump.Fun GO, a new feature on Pump.Fun, one of the fastest-growing crypto businesses of the past few years. It supposedly allows users to “pay anyone to do anything.” Crypto bounties are put up by individuals—or pooled from multiple wallets—and held in escrow by Pump.Fun until a countdown clock runs out. Finishing a task is supposed to net you the prize payout; creators get a refund if nobody completes the mission. Pump.Fun, whose legal department did not return a request for comment, has said without clarifying its process that it moderates and …

JWST’s Little Red Dots could be black hole feeding bursts

JWST’s Little Red Dots could be black hole feeding bursts

Published by skeptic

A new theoretical study suggests that Little Red Dots observed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could be black holes in rare, short-lived – but extremely volatile – nuclear bursts. A paper by Yangyao Chen of Nanjing University and Houjun Mo of the University of Massachusetts reexamined a phenomena that has intrigued scientists since the JWST’s debut. Astronomers have observed nearly 350 faintly-red objects that are particularly unusual for their apparent lack of x-ray, radio and infrared emission. They have a V-shaped spectrum, being bright in ultraviolet and optical light, but dim in between, as well as the broad emission lines associated with black hole activity. Current theories posed that that the Little Red Dots – or LRDs – are primordial galaxies, or non-metallic primordial stars(also known as Population III stars), or even quasi-stars. The majority seem to have been formed 600 million years after the Big Bang, or 13.2 to 12.2 billion years ago. Chen and Mo created a galaxy formation model built on the ΛCDM cosmological framework reported in a previous study. …

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Milky Way’s central black hole wind finally detected ending 50-year search

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Milky Way’s central black hole has long posed an awkward problem. By every standard picture of how black holes behave, Sagittarius A* should be blowing material back into space as it feeds. Yet for more than half a century, astronomers could not find clear evidence that it was doing so. Now they say that missing wind has finally turned up. A team at Northwestern University used years of observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile to build an unusually sharp map of the cold gas crowding the black hole’s neighborhood. In that map, they found a broad, cone-shaped cavity carved out of molecular gas within about one parsec, or roughly three light-years, of Sagittarius A*. The researchers argue that only a hot wind from the black hole can explain the feature. Therefore, this offers what they describe as the clearest evidence yet that the Milky Way’s central black hole is not an exception to the usual rules. The highest-resolution and most sensitive map of cold gas within ∼1 pc from …

JWST spots dormant black hole 10 billion light-years from Earth

JWST spots dormant black hole 10 billion light-years from Earth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. Anything unfortunate enough to venture too close to a black hole inevitably falls prey to the gargantuan object’s inescapable gravitational pull. But that doesn’t mean a black hole is constantly devouring its next cosmic meal. In many cases, there comes a time when there simply isn’t anything left in its vicinity to consume. Although these dormant black holes don’t go anywhere, astronomers have a tough time detecting and observing them. That hasn’t stopped researchers from successfully spotting the most distant example ever seen. At over 10 billion light-years from Earth, the dormant black hole inside the galaxy MRG-M0138 is 15 times farther away than the prior record holder. As astronomers explained in a study published on June 4 in the journal Science, the …