Researchers have created a new optical illusion that makes your brain try to predict the future — namely, entering a dark tunnel.
Black holes are bizarre things, even by the standards of astronomers. Their mass is so great, it bends space around them so tightly that nothing can escape, even light itself.
And yet, despite their famous blackness, some black holes are quite visible. The gas and stars these galactic vacuums devour are sucked into a glowing disk before their one-way trip into the hole, and these disks can shine more brightly than entire galaxies.
Stranger still, these black holes twinkle. The brightness of the glowing disks can fluctuate from day to day, and nobody is entirely sure why.
Interview with Prof. Sean Carroll, Research Professor of Physics at Caltech and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. We mainly talk about quantum spacetime: the idea that our familiar spacetime might be actually emergent from some complex quantum mechanical system. We cover entanglement, decoherence, entropic gravity, the AdS/CFT correspondence, string theory, black holes, along with several philosophical questions concerning these topics, including reduction and emergence, substantivalism vs. relationalism, monism, and much more.
Sean’s website: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/
His recent book concerning these topics: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/somethingdeeplyhidden/
His papers on these topics can be found here: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/research/annotated-publications/
His podcast: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/
And his Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanmcarroll/
Scientists try to unravel the birth, growth and power of black holes, some of the most forceful yet difficult-to-detect objects in our universe.
It was only last year that astronomers were finally able to unveil the first pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. But you couldn’t actually see the black hole itself, not directly. That’s because it is so dense that its gravitational pull prevents even light from escaping.
But the image of Sagittarius A, as our galaxy’s black hole is known, revealed a glowing halo of gas around the object—an object that we now know has a million times more mass than our sun.
Astronomers in charge of the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a black hole in the heart of a dwarf galaxy that, rather than absorbing stars, generates them.
Astronomers spotted the wake left by the supermassive black hole as it barrels across the disk after being kicked out during a galactic merger.
Dark energy is the name physicists have given to the mysterious thing driving the universe’s accelerated expansion. It may be a force or a form of energy, and one piece of evidence suggests it is hidden inside black holes.
These hypothetical stars are the densest objects in the universe that can exist without becoming full-fledged black holes.
