Mysterious Medium-Size Black Holes May Lurk at the Centers of Small Galaxies

The hearts of small galaxies may hide a mysterious kind of black hole that has long proved elusive: medium-size black holes with masses between the mass of a few suns and that of millions of suns, a new study finds.

Supermassive black hole spotted tearing star to shreds

As mysteries go, they don't come much bigger than this. What was the strange ultrabright flash in a distant galaxy, spotted last year? Some astronomers thought it was the brilliant blast from a particularly massive exploding star, while others suspected it was an entirely new cosmic object altogether.

Now new observations pin the blame on a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole, lurking in the centre of the galaxy, tearing a star apart.

The work, reported in Nature Astronomy, offers a plausible solution to the enigmatic event, including why it brightened after dimming, says Jeff Cooke, an astronomer at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia who was not involved with the study.

LIGO Black Hole Echoes Hint at General Relativity Breakdown

It was hailed as an elegant confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — but ironically the discovery of gravitational waves earlier this year could herald the first evidence that the theory breaks down at the edge of black holes. Physicists have analysed the publicly released data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and claim to have found “echoes” of the waves that seem to contradict general relativity’s predictions1.

The echoes could yet disappear with more data. If they persist, the finding would be extraordinary. Physicists have predicted that Einstein’s hugely successful theory could break down in extreme scenarios, such as at the centre of black holes. The echoes would indicate the even more dramatic possibility that relativity fails at the black hole’s edge, far from its core.

Black Hole Is A Swirl Of Vast Quantum Information, Research Says [VIDEO]

Black holes have always fascinated people from all walks of life for many years. One of the most common questions that has been asked is what's inside these strong electromagnetic fields that pull all of the light in the middle of it? It looks like scientists have found an answer thanks to a recent research filled with vast quantum information.

A recent research published in the pre-printed arXiv found that the X-ray radiation originating from the fast-spinning black holes is filled with a wealth of quantum information.

The curve of space-time seemed to have a unique shape near the fast spinning space phenomena. These unique twists turn the polarization angle of photons that are coming or passing near a black hole. The activity encodes a qubit which is the unit of quantum information equivalent to one bit.

Read the entire article:
http://www.universityherald.com/articles/54522/20161212/black-hole-swirl-vast-quantum-information-research-video.htm

Scientists find that supermassive black holes are aligned [VIDEO]

Stephen Hawking boldly claims there are no black holes

PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking has shocked the scientific community by radically claiming there are no black holes.

In an article by Nature it is reported that Hawking, who is responsible for creating the theories on what we know about black holes today, has done away with notions science has held true for almost 40 years.

He claims the event horizon - an invisible boundary covering every black hole beyond which nothing, not even light can escape - do not exist.

Instead what Hawking suggests is an "apparent horizon", which temporarily traps matter and energy before releasing it into space.

"There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory," Hawking told Nature. Quantum theory, however, "enables energy and information to escape from a black hole".

Now buckle up - here's where it all gets a bit confusing...

Read the entire article:
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/stephen-hawking-boldly-claims-there-are-no-black-holes/story-fnjwlcze-1226810339993

Milky Way's Huge Black Hole to Gobble Gas Cloud Soon

A giant gas cloud is set to spiral into the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's core in the next few months, and scientists should get a great view of the dramatic celestial action.

NASA's Swift satellite will have a front-row seat for the enormous gas cloud collision, and astronomers can barely contain their excitement.

"Everyone wants to see the event happening because it's so rare," Nathalie Degenaar, of the University of Michigan, said in a statement.

In 2003, scientists discovered what seemed to be a cloud of gas, termed G2, which should collide in March or thereabouts with the supermassive black hole that lurks at the heart of the Milky Way. The interaction will reveal much about this black hole, which is known as Sagittarius A* (or Sag A* for short).

Although scientists have observed signs of such feeding in other galaxies, it's rare to see these events so close to home.

Black Hole’s Behavior Defies the Rules of Astrophysics

Black Hole Basics

Astronomers believe black holes — those reality-warping, light-sucking singular forces of nature — come in three basic varieties. You’ve got your stellar mass black holes, about as massive as our sun; you’ve got intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs), some 100 to 1,000 times the sun’s mass; and you’ve got the immodestly named supermassive black holes, up to billions of times the sun’s mass. So basically, small, medium, and large.

Astronomers have a number of ways to tell the different kinds of black holes apart. Larger black holes, for instance, give off low-energy X-rays, and smaller black holes produce high-energy X-rays. (To be clear, it’s not the black hole itself that’s emitting this light, but the rapidly accelerating mass of swirling stuff around it about to get “devoured” by the black hole.)

Imagine astronomers’ surprise, then, when a Nature paper came out indicating that a particular star system — with all the hallmarks of an IMBH, including low-energy X-rays, and ultra-bright illumination — is actually a tiny stellar mass black hole.

Read the entire article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2013/11/27/black-holes-behavior-defies-the-rules-of-astrophysics/

Scientists witness massive gamma-ray burst, don't understand it

Scientists have studied gamma-ray bursts, which are triggered by the collapse of massive stars, for three decades. Now, one is forcing them to reconsider what they thought they knew.

An exploded star some 3.8 billion light-years away is forcing scientists to overhaul much of what they thought they knew about gamma-ray bursts – intense blasts of radiation triggered, in this case, by a star tens of times more massive than the sun that exhausted its nuclear fuel, exploded, then collapsed to form a black hole.

Last April, gamma rays from the blast struck detectors in gamma-ray observatories orbiting Earth, triggering a frenzy of space- and ground-based observations. Many of them fly in the face of explanations researchers have developed during the past 30 years for the processes driving the evolution of a burst from flash to fade out, according to four research papers appearing Friday in the journal Science.

“Some of our theories are just going down the drain,” said Charles Dermer, an astrophysicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a member of one of the teams reporting on their observations of the burst, known as GRB 130427A.

The event, dubbed a long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB), is typically seen in the distant, early universe, Dr. Dermer said during a briefing Thursday. This one was much closer. And while typical long-duration bursts last from a few seconds to a few minutes, GRB 130427A put on its display for 20 hours.

Read the entire article:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1121/Scientists-witness-massive-gamma-ray-burst-don-t-understand-it