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black hole bares all for science
Generally, when you think of a black hole, you probably imagine a pitch black sphere surrounded by a swirling accretion disk of white hot matter spinning around it. The pitch black “surface” of a black...
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black holes and ancient dwarf galaxies
Two of the questions anyone who writes extensively about black holes gets is how we actually know where an object that’s powerful enough to funnel photons into is gravitational field really is, and how...
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replicating hawking radiation in the lab
Many a physicist wonder if black holes, the gravitational ghosts of massive stars that distort the fabric of space and time to the breaking point with their tidal forces, may have a soft underbelly....
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are monster black holes on an entropy frenzy?
Over the last few decades, cosmologists discovered what the future of the universe may hold. That concludes the part of the post where we entertain a single shred of optimism since it seems that our...
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who wants to build a warp drive anyway?
Usually, when I post about a scientific paper, the focus is on its methodology and interpreting its conclusions into real world applications. This time, we’re going to do something a little different...
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the micro black hole dilemma, revisited
Do you hear the rumble in the background? That’s the Large Hadron Collider getting ready to smash particles and either seal the standard model of particle physics for the foreseeable future, or...
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spaceships, now with black hole reactors?
Once upon a time, we took a look at why creating black holes in particle colliders and using them to generate energy for our power grids was fraught with problems. However, if at sometime in the future...
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say, how far away is that black hole?
Trying to pin down the distance between our planet and a nearby black hole is a very tricky business. By virtue of being pinpoints of self-gravitating energy, black holes are usually about the size of...
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in the beginning, there was the black hole
Just for a little astrophysics fun, let’s imagine that we’re back in the early days of the universe and the very first generation of stars is about to be born. Since the entire hot and dense universe...
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getting information from a black hole’s maw
Physicists are loath to break the laws by which the universe works when putting together their equations. They don’t fear a trip to physics jail or anything like that, but if their work requires a...
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do quasars break the laws of physics?
Today, it’s pretty much common knowledge that time doesn’t behave the same way across space. The shape of the space-time fabric around massive objects like stars and planets actually slows its passage,...
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where to find the energy for a warp drive
There have been a number of posts about interstellar travel on this blog, including one on the feasibility of an idea from Stephen Hawking regarding the use of Dyson spheres to absorb a star’s energy...
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mining physics for “groundbreaking” papers
Black holes are immensely fascinating cosmic phenomena. They’re not even objects but places where much of what we know about physics is put on its head, twisted forward, backwards, sideways, blended...
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how hot could it get inside a black hole?
The old adage about nothing escaping a black hole’s gravitational pull isn’t strictly true. Despite being cosmic vacuum cleaners, ferociously feeding on anything that strays too close and locking the...
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the birth of a supermassive monster, revisited
We know that black holes can grow to become absolutely enormous in size, tipping the scales at billions and billions of times the mass of our sun. The numbers involved make the gravitational monsters...
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searching for wormholes with general relativity
When you’re reading sci-fi stories in which some of the characters find themselves in need to cover hundreds or thousands of light years very quickly without a warp drive, they manage to make it...
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finding aliens by the black holes they make?
As the world keeps moving forward, our energy requirements are constantly increasing. Our cities and towns are consuming terawatt after terawatt, and as new technology comes online and old technology...
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cyclical cosmology debate keeps on cycling…
Since we last discussed the universe according to Roger Penrose, I thought the physics community wasn’t going to dedicate more time to the theory of cyclical cosmology, but apparently, I was wrong. It...
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can you really fall into a black hole? or, fun with time dilation.
As we discussed many times on Weird Things, black holes are the most amazing and terrifying things in the universe we know, and they’re not shy about gathering every law of physics we’re sure we...
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and now for something surprisingly simpler
Usually a new discovery in deep space tends to further complicate our picture of the universe, almost as if the cosmos says "oh yeah, you think you have a good idea of how this works?" and throws a...
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