This European Southern Observatory animation was created to celebrate the opening of the new ESO Supernova Planetarium in Germany. It begins from the home of the new facility in Garching and zooms our to the “End of the Universe”, according to the ESO.
Music: inspiring adventure cinematic background by maryna.
Twenty years ago, NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory beamed back its stunning “First Light” image of Cassiopeia A – but it’s still been checking back in every now and then.
Here’s how the supernova remnant has shifted and flowed in the two decades since go.nasa.gov/30AaeLr
Black holes are some of the most powerful and fascinating phenomena in our Universe, but due to their tendency to swallow up anything nearby, getting up close to them for some detailed analysis isn’t possible right now.
Instead, scientists have put forward a proposal for how we might be able to model these massive, complex objects in the lab — using holograms.
While experiments haven’t yet been carried out, the researchers have put forward a theoretical framework for a black hole hologram that would allow us to test some of the more mysterious and elusive properties of black holes — specifically what happens to the laws of physics beyond its event horizon.
Ummmn o.o!
How are black holes born? Astrophysicists have theories, but we don’t actually know for certain. It could be massive stars quietly imploding with a floompf, or perhaps black holes are born in the explosions of colossal supernovas. New observations now indicate it might indeed be the latter.
In fact, the research suggests that those explosions are so powerful, they can kick the black holes across the galaxy at speeds greater than 70 kilometres per second (43 miles per second).
Continue reading “Millions of High-Speed Black Holes Could Be Zooming Around The Milky Way” »
A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. These cosmic phenomena are said to form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. Then, they can continue to grow by absorbing mass from their surroundings, engulfing stars in their path and merging with other black holes.
Wow. The Chandra X-ray Observatory just celebrated its 20th anniversary of being launched into space! It roared into orbit on board the Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999.
Continue reading “Watch the expansion of the Cas A supernova remnant with your own eyes!” »
Then again, maybe not.
In a previous post, I explained why quantum mechanics predicts that there are countless versions of you running around in what could be an infinite number of parallel universes.
This time, I’m going to introduce a controversial proposal by MIT physicist Max Tegmark, that uses these parallel universes to argue that you might actually be immortal.
I am going home :3.
Everybody wants a wormhole. I mean, who wants to bother traveling the long-and-slow routes throughout the universe, taking tens of thousands of years just to reach yet another boring star? Not when you can pop into the nearest wormhole opening, take a short stroll, and end up in some exotic far-flung corner of the universe.
There’s a small technical difficulty, though: Wormholes, which are bends in space-time so extreme that a shortcut tunnel forms, are catastrophically unstable. As in, as soon as you send a single photon down the hole, it collapses faster than the speed of light.
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