I’m at GeekGirlCon this weekend, so I’m busy with non-writing activities as part of the DIY Science Zone. Thanks to our Fearless Leader Dr. “Nick Fury” Rubidium for putting our part of the event together!

• Where Nature Hides the Darkest Mystery of All (Nautilus): Even though there’s no solid barrier, the event horizon of a black hole provides a boundary through which we can’t see or probe. That leads to a troubling idea: will we ever know what’s really inside that event horizon? Is there any way to learn about the interior by indirect measurements?
• Black hole hair and the dark energy problem (Galileo’s Pendulum): Building off that article, what happens if our standard theory of gravity is modified? That’s not an entirely crazy idea: several modifications to general relativity have been proposed, inspired by inflation (the rapid expansion during the cosmos’ earliest moments) or dark energy. A recent paper examined that idea, and here’s my take.
• Strongly magnetic pulsar could explain anomalous supernovas (Ars Technica): Some supernovas are particularly bright, especially some from the early Universe. These, known as “pair-instability” supernovas, are the explosion of very massive stars made of nearly pure hydrogen and helium. However, some of these super-luminous supernovas don’t quite fit that profile, including being too close. A new set of observations may show they are actually driven by a magnetar, a highly magnetized pulsar.
• Gravitational waves show deficit in black hole collisions (Ars Technica): Mergers of supermassive black holes should happen frequently enough to produce a bath of gravitational radiation permeating the cosmos. While that gravitational wave background (GWB) possesses wavelengths too large for ground-based detectors like LIGO, astronomers realized it might be visible in the fluctuations of light from pulsars. However, they didn’t see what they expected, leading to the big question: why not?