The Royal Observatory of Greenwich, England, has crafted three simple animations to explain three very complex things: What’s inside a black hole, how do we know the age of the sun—did you know the Sun weighs 4,000 trillion trillion hippopotamuses?—and how big is the Universe.
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According to physicists, there are three, er, two and a half different theories on how a person would die if they got sucked in by a black hole: stretched like a spaghetti noodle, burnt like a toast and maybe even scrambled. Nova PBS explains that if the argument on how people would die if swallowed by a black hole were to ever be settled, it would "revolutionize the fundamental laws of nature". Watch and learn why in the video below
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Stephen Hawking. Theoretical Physicist. Cosmologist. Smart guy. Beyond genius, actually. Hell, very probably the best brain that us humans have right now. But so much of his intelligence is hard to grasp for less wrinkled brains like us. This animation, made by The Guardian as part of its Made Simple series, breaks down the basics of some of Hawking’s ideas about black holes, singularity, gravity, physics, Hawking Radiation and so forth. You might get a little smarter? [The Guardian via Brain Pickings]
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Over 47 million light years away, in a galaxy called NGC 4845, there’s one hungry black hole. In fact, scientists have watched in awe as, soon after it stirred from dormancy, it chomped away at a planet 30 times the mass of Jupiter. More »
This stunningly trippy object is W49B, a supernova remnant 26,000 light years away from Earth. It’s just a thousand years old, which in cosmological terms is not even a heartbeat in the life of a human. It may also be the birth place of a newborn black hole, the youngest ever detected in the galaxy. More »
The black hole at the center of our galaxy isn’t happy. In fact, it’s spitting out its biggest X-ray flares ever, which are a hundred times more powerful than anything it’s ever produced before. More »
It was Bret Easton Ellis who coined the phrase, “The better you look, the more you see,” and it appears the folks down at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab agree. In what’s considered a “first,” the agency’s latest space-scouring probe, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, has turned on its X-ray vision to capture focused images of a black hole, dubbed Cygnus X-1, feeding on a nearby giant star. By tuning into these high-energy frequencies, scientists are getting a peak into a previously unseen side of the heavens at 100 times the sensitivity and 10 times the resolution of any preceding tech. The space agency plans to use the observatory’s powerful sight to suss out other known areas of mass X-ray activity like 3C273, an active quasar located two billion light years away and even explore G21.5-0.9, the fallout from a supernova within the Milky Way galaxy. NuSTAR’s first tour of galactic duty will span two year’s time, during which it’ll attempt to record imagery from “the most energetic objects in the universe, ” as well as track the existence of black holes throughout the cosmos. Impressed? Yeah, us too.
Continue reading NASA’s NuSTAR probe snaps first X-ray image of feeding black hole
NASA’s NuSTAR probe snaps first X-ray image of feeding black hole originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jun 2012 07:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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