*For his discoveries about the lives and deaths of stars, the exotic physics of black holes and the origin of chemical elements, UA Regents’ Professor David Arnett has been honored with the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship.*
What happens when a star dies? How does a black hole form? What makes the chemical elements that form the building blocks of stars, planets and living beings?
Those are the kinds of questions that have fascinated David Arnett, a Regents’ Professor at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, from an early age. (more…)
*The Event Horizon Telescope is an Earth-sized virtual telescope powerful enough to see all the way to the center of our Milky Way, where a supermassive black hole will allow astrophysicists to put Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity to the test.*
Astronomers, physicists and scientists from related fields across the world will convene in Tucson, Ariz. on Jan. 18 to discuss an endeavor that only a few years ago would have been regarded as nothing less than outrageous.
The conference is organized by Dimitrios Psaltis, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, and Dan Marrone, an assistant professor of astronomy at Steward Observatory. (more…)
Astronomers at Yale University have discovered what appear to be three fast-growing supermassive black holes in a relatively young, still-forming galaxy.
The discovery raises the possibility that this type of black hole continues to form billions of years after the Big Bang, challenging current theory. Astronomers previously thought all supermassive black holes emerged soon after the birth of the universe 13.7 billion years ago. (more…)
The green Voorwerp in the foreground remains illuminated by light emitted up to 70,000 years ago by a quasar in the center of the background galaxy, which has since died out. Image credit: WIYN/William Keel/Anna Manning
While sorting through hundreds of galaxy images as part of the Galaxy Zoo citizen science project two years ago, Dutch schoolteacher and volunteer astronomer Hanny van Arkel stumbled upon a strange-looking object that baffled professional astronomers. Two years later, a team led by Yale University researchers has discovered that the unique object represents a snapshot in time that reveals surprising clues about the life cycle of black holes.
In a new study, the team has confirmed that the unusual object, known as Hanny’s Voorwerp (Hanny’s “object” in Dutch), is a large cloud of glowing gas illuminated by the light from a quasar-an extremely energetic galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its center. The twist, described online in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, is that the quasar lighting up the gas has since burned out almost entirely, even though the light it emitted in the past continues to travel through space, illuminating the gas cloud and producing a sort of “light echo” of the dead quasar. (more…)
If you think global warming is bad, 11 billion years ago the entire universe underwent what might be called universal warming. The consequence of that early heating was that fierce blasts of radiation from voracious black holes stunted the growth of some small galaxies for a stretch of 500 million years. (more…)
Labor Day 2010 comes in the midst of a stunning wave of U.S. factory closings that stretches from coast to coast.
Once upon a time America was the greatest manufacturing machine that the world has ever seen, but now it seems as though the only jobs available for working class Americans involve phrases such as “Welcome to Wal-Mart” and “Would you like fries with that?”.
Russian physicists seriously believe that the Large Hadron Collider can be used for time travel. However, it will only happen when it starts working at full capacity and stops breaking down. If earlier time travel was considered science fiction, now it suddenly turned into the favorite pet project of theoretical physicists. Renowned physicist Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology once said in one of his lectures:
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—The black hole at the center of the galaxy is to blame for sling-shotting “hypervelocity stars” out of the Milky Way at up to 1.8 million miles per hour, according to new evidence from research involving a University of Michigan astronomer.(more…)
