Tag: Black Holes

Categories
GeekWire

LIGO and Virgo gear up for gravitational waves

LIGO upgrade
Detector engineers Hugh Radkins (foreground) and Betsy Weaver (background) take up positions inside the vacuum system of the detector at LIGO Hanford Observatory to perform the hardware upgrades required for Advanced LIGO’s third observing run. (LIGO / Caltech / MIT Photo / Jeff Kissel)

Physicists won’t be fooling around on April 1 at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory in Washington state and Louisiana, or at the Virgo gravitational-wave detector in Italy.

Instead, they’ll all be bearing down for the most serious search ever conducted for signs of merging black holes, colliding neutron stars — and perhaps the first detection of a mashup involving both those exotic phenomena.

Both experiments have been upgraded significantly since their last observational runs, resulting in a combined increase of about 40 percent in sensitivity. That means even more cosmic smashups should be detected, at distances farther out. There’s also a better chance of determining precisely where cosmic collisions occur, increasing the chances of following up with other types of observations.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Four black hole smashups added to LIGO’s list

Black hole merger
An artist’s conception shows two black holes merging. (LIGO / Caltech / MIT Illustration)

Four more mergers of black holes, including the biggest one recorded to date, have been added to a catalog generated by gravitational-wave detectors.

The additions were announced today by the teams in charge of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, and the European-based Virgo detector. The full list of stellar-mass binary black hole mergers now stands at 10, with a neutron-star merger thrown in for good measure.

“The release of four additional binary black hole mergers further informs us of the nature of the population of these binary systems in the universe, and better constrains the event rate for these types of events,” Caltech physicist Albert Lazzarini, deputy director of the LIGO Laboratory, said in a news release

The four previously unreported detections came to light during a re-analysis of data from LIGO’s first two observing runs. The third run, known as O3, is scheduled to begin next spring.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Relativity rules star near our galaxy’s black hole

A 26-year-long observational campaign provides clear evidence of the effect that general relativity has on the motion of a star known as S2 as it boomerangs around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Neutrino trackers solve a cosmic ray puzzle

Blazar and neutrino
In this artistic rendering, a blazar is accelerating protons that produce pions, which produce neutrinos and gamma rays. One neutrino’s path is represented by a blue line passing through Antarctica, while a gamma ray’s path is shown in pink. (IceCube / NASA Illustration)

An array of detectors buried under a half-mile-wide stretch of Antarctic ice has traced the path of a single neutrino back to a supermassive black hole in a faraway galaxy, shedding light on a century-old cosmic ray mystery in the process.

The discovery, revealed today in a flurry of research papers published by the journal Science and The Astrophysical Journal, marks a milestone for the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the National Science Foundation’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.

It also marks a milestone for an observational frontier known as multi-messenger astrophysics, which takes advantage of multiple observatories looking at the sky in different ways. Thanks to IceCube’s alert, more than a dozen telescopes were able to triangulate on the neutrino’s source.

“No one telescope could have done this by themselves,” said IceCube lead scientist Francis Halzen, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Stephen Hawking gets a cosmic sendoff

Stephen Hawking memorial stone
Stephen Hawking’s memorial stone depicts a black hole as well as an equation that describes the temperature of a black hole’s Hawking radiation. (Westminster Abbey via Twitter)

Famed physicist Stephen Hawking’s ashes were interred among the greats of British science at Westminster Abbey today — and to mark his passing, his message of peace and hope was beamed to the nearest known black hole.

Black holes were a favorite subject for the theorist, who died in March at the age of 76 after dealing with progressive disability for decades. His memorial stone on the abbey’s floor, which is sure to become the site of scientific pilgrimages for decades to come, is engraved with the outlines of a black hole as well as an equation that describes a black hole’s Hawking radiation.

Today’s memorial ceremony was anything but dark. Nobel-winning scientists and Oscar-winning celebrities joined Hawking’s family and more than 1,000 others to pay tribute to the physicist.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Our view of black holes may change … again

Brian Greene
Columbia physicist Brian Greene delves into Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity in “Light Falls,” a theater piece that made its debut at the World Science Festival. (Greg Kessler Photo / World Science Festival)

After decades’ worth of mystery, it feels as if physicists are finally closing in on the nature of black holes, thanks to Nobel-winning breakthroughs like the first detections of black hole mergers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.

But Columbia University physicist Brian Greene warns that those matter-gobbling monsters may have a few surprises in them yet.

“To watch the history of this subject unfold from a purely theoretical idea to one that now is driving observational tests is enormously exciting,” Greene told GeekWire.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

NASA’s Rossi X-ray probe makes a quiet exit

Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer
An artist’s conception shows the Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer. (NASA Illustration)

A month after the breakup of China’s Tiangong-1 space lab, another spacecraft went to its fiery doom today with far less fanfare. Orbital assessments from the U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center indicate that NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer made its atmospheric re-entry at roughly 7:45 a.m. PT (14:45 GMT), more than 22 years after its launch and six years after it was decommissioned.

Get the news brief on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Gravitational waves play role in black hole show

Black hole
A disk of superheated debris blazes around a black hole. The bright circular pattern is caused by the gravitational lensing of light from the part of the disk that’s behind the black hole. (NOVA via YouTube)

Black holes are the collapsed stars of the show on “Black Hole Apocalypse,” a two-hour “NOVA” presentation that’s premiering Jan. 10 on PBS. But the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, also known as LIGO, gets its share of the spotlight as well.

“LIGO both opens and closes the show,” said Barnard College astrophysicist Janna Levin, who wrote a book about the gravitational-wave quest and hosts the “NOVA” program. “It’s the most important thing going on right now for black hole astrophysics.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Black holes photobomb Andromeda Galaxy

Black hole pair in Andromeda Galaxy
A combination of X-ray and optical imagery shows the black hole pair known as J0045+41 glowing amid the much closer stars of the Andromeda Galaxy. (X-ray: NASA / CXC / UW / Dorn-Wallenstein et al. Optical: NASA / ESA / J. Dalcanton et al. and R. Gendler)

It turns out that even galaxies can be photobombed.

Imagery from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes reveal what researchers say could be the closest-orbiting pair of supermassive black holes ever seen.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Scientists spot a smallish black hole smashup

Black hole merger
An artist’s conception shows two black holes in the process of merging. (LIGO / Caltech / MIT Illustration)

It took months to figure it out, but the scientists in charge of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, have confirmed their observations of the most lightweight black hole merger yet.

The latest detection provides further confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity — and will help physicists hone their routine for combining observations from different types of scientific instruments, an approach known as “multi-messenger astronomy.”

Scientists say the spike in gravitational waves known as GW170608, detected on June 8, was set off by the smashup of two black holes weighing seven and 12 times as much as our sun.

Get the full story on GeekWire.