A supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy is rewriting the rules of astrophysics, with unprecedented activity that has left astronomers around the world both fascinated and perplexed. Plasma jets traveling at record-breaking speeds and rapid X-ray fluctuations near the event horizon are just some of the strange phenomena observed in real time. What secrets is this cosmic behemoth revealing, and how might it reshape our understanding of black holes?
Are there particles that can move faster than light? Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb explores this question and the mysterious role of tachyons.
An international team of researchers has detected a binary star orbiting close to Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. It is the first time a stellar pair has been found in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole.
The discovery, based on data collected by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), helps us understand how stars survive in environments with extreme gravity, and could pave the way for the detection of planets close to Sagittarius A*.
“Black holes are not as destructive as we thought,” says Florian Peißker, a researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany, and lead author of the study published in Nature Communications.
Astronomers have identified two supermassive black holes, collectively known as PKS 2131-021, that are on the brink of a catastrophic collision. Located about 9 billion light-years from Earth, these black holes have been spiraling toward each other for 100 million years and now orbit one another every two years. The discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, reveals a fascinating binary system that could help scientists understand how black holes form and merge.
PKS 2131-021 is a type of black hole known as a blazar, characterized by jets of supercharged plasma directed at Earth. These jets, which originate from the hot gas swirling around the black hole, travel at nearly the speed of light. When researchers observed the brightness of about 1,800 blazars across the universe, PKS 2131-021 stood out due to its regular fluctuations, akin to the ticking of a clock. This periodic dimming and brightening is believed to result from the gravitational influence of a second black hole in orbit.
To confirm this, scientists analyzed 45 years of data from five observatories. The findings matched predictions, confirming that the brightness variations were caused by a binary black hole system.
Galactic gravity can dramatically impact wide binary stars, pushing them towards unexpected mergers or collisions.
The detection of gravitational waves.
Gravitational waves are distortions or ripples in the fabric of space and time. They were first detected in 2015 by the Advanced LIGO detectors and are produced by catastrophic events such as colliding black holes, supernovae, or merging neutron stars.
A New Phenomenon in Markarian 817
Astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole in the galaxy Markarian 817 (Mrk 817), located 430 million light-years away in the constellation Draco, unleashing ultra-fast winds that are disrupting its host galaxy. Detected using ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescope, this discovery marks the first instance of such winds emerging from a moderately feeding black hole, defying previous expectations.
That’s the word from a new set of predictions for the decade ahead issued by Accenture, which highlights how our future is being shaped by AI-powered autonomy. By 2030, agents — not people — will be the “primary users of most enterprises’ internal digital systems,” the study’s co-authors state. By 2032, “interacting with agents surpasses apps in average consumer time spent on smart devices.”
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This heralds a moment of transition, what the report’s primary author, Accenture CTO Karthik Narain, calls the Binary Big Bang. “When foundation models cracked the natural language barrier,” writes Narain, “they kickstarted a shift in our technology systems: how we design them, use them, and how they operate.”
Researchers led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a breakthrough technique that could lay the foundations for detecting the universe’s “dark matter” and bring scientists closer than before to uncovering the secrets of the cosmos.
The things we can see on Earth and in space— visible matter like rocks and stars—make up only a small portion of the universe, as scientists believe that 85% of matter in the cosmos comprises invisible dark matter. This mysterious substance is said to be the invisible glue holding galaxies together. Finding it could help us understand cosmic phenomena that cannot be explained solely by the matter we see.
But proving the existence of dark matter is a herculean task. As its name suggests, dark matter is “dark,” meaning it does not normally emit or reflect light, carries no electric charge and interacts extremely weakly with normal matter, making it undetectable with conventional scientific instruments.
In October 2022, scientists detected the explosive death of a star 2.4 billion light-years away that was brighter than any ever recorded.
As the star’s core collapsed down into a black hole, the gamma-ray burst emitted by the star – an event named GRB 221009A – erupted with energies of up to 18 teraelectronvolts. Gamma-ray bursts are already the brightest explosions our Universe can produce; but GRB 221009A was an absolute record-smasher, earning it the moniker “the BOAT” – Brightest Of All Time.
There is, however, something wrong with the picture, according to a team of astrophysicists led by Giorgio Galanti of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy. Based on cutting-edge models of the Universe, we shouldn’t be able to see photons more powerful than 10 teraelectronvolts in data from the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) that made the detection.
The enigmatic galaxy AGC 114,905 spans vast distances but contains 100 times fewer stars than the Milky Way.