Tag: black holes
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Seeing the invisible monster at the Milky Way center
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] This is my second print magazine feature for Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine. The first was about gravitational waves, published not long before the LIGO detector found the first gravitational…
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A discovery that made a thousand scientists burst into cheers and tears
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] It’s not every day that we get to usher in an entirely new branch of astronomy. Yesterday, members of the LIGO collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational…
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How can we see black holes if they’re invisible?
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] The Shadow of a Black Hole From NOVA: The invisible manifests itself through the visible: so say many of the great works of philosophy, poetry, and religion. It’s also…
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Listening to the sounds of the cosmos
[ This blog is dedicated to tracking my most recent publications. Subscribe to the feed to keep up with all the science stories I write! ] Last year, I went to a conference in Florida to hear — and in some cases meet — some of the leading thinkers in the study of gravitational waves.…
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Using Black Holes to Measure Dark Energy, Like a BOSS
Far from being invisible, black holes are among some of the brightest objects in the Universe. The black holes themselves aren’t emitting light, but the matter they draw in heats up and much of it shoots back out in powerful jets. When that happens, the black hole is known as a quasar, and it can…
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Measuring black hole rotation halfway across the Universe
Astronomers measured the rotation of a black hole from halfway across the Universe. Astronomers have now used gravitational magnification to measure the rotation rate of a supermassive black hole in a very distant galaxy. From four separate images of the same black hole, R.C. Reis, M.T. Reynolds, J.M. Miller, and D.J. Walton found it was…
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How did the biggest black holes form?
The most massive known object in the cosmos is the black hole at the center of M87, a huge galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. While most large galaxies (including the Milky Way) harbor supermassive black holes, the very largest are interesting. That’s because galaxies and their black holes seem to share a history, based on…
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Stephen Hawking, black holes, and scientific celebrity
For the upcoming ScienceOnline 2014 meeting, I’m leading a session titled “Reporting Incremental Science in a World that wants Big Results“. It’s an important topic. We who communicate science to the general public have to evaluate stories to see if they’re worth covering, then translate them in such a way that conveys their significance without…
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Ionizing the Universe with black holes and neutron stars
About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe cooled off enough for stable atoms to form out of the primordial plasma. However, sometime in the billion years or so after that, something happened to heat the gas up again, returning it to plasma form. Though we know reionization (as it is called) happened, that…
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The week in review (October 20-26)
I had a wonderful time at GeekGirlCon; thanks again to Dr. Rubidium, AKA Nick Fury, for putting together the DIY Science Zone, and to everyone who made it a great event. I have a more formal wrap-up post in the works, but in the meantime, have some science writing. The river of spacetime (Galileo’s Pendulum):…
Bowler Hat Science 