Search Results for “black holes” – Quanta Magazine

How Do Merging Supermassive Black Holes Pass the Final Parsec?

Jonathan O'Callaghan — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:17:48 +0000

Galaxies have been merging into ever-bigger structures over the course of cosmic history. When galaxies merge, the supermassive black holes that sit in their centers must eventually merge, too, forming an even more gargantuan black hole. For decades, though, a question has vexed astrophysicists: How can supermassive black holes get close enough to spiral together and coalesce? In calculations…

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Quanta Magazine Unravels Space and Time in Ambitious New Series

Michael Kanyongolo — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:07:55 +0000

For over a decade, Quanta Magazine has challenged and delighted fans with stories about the most fundamental questions in science. Today, in its most ambitious project to date, the magazine brings its audience into what might be the deepest mystery of all: the nature of reality itself.

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The #1 Clue to Quantum Gravity Sits on the Surfaces of Black Holes

Joseph Howlett — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:05:57 +0000

Karl Schwarzschild first stumbled upon black holes in 1916, but for a long time they weren’t really a thing. “Black holes were discovered as a purely geometric object — in a sense, just empty space. Nothing,” said Yuk Ting Albert Law, a theoretical physicist at Stanford University. A mathematical oddity that popped out of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, a black hole is the space…

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Mathematicians Prove Hawking Wrong About the Most Extreme Black Holes

Steve Nadis — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 14:31:25 +0000

To understand the universe, scientists look to its outliers. “You always want to know about the extreme cases — the special cases that lie at the edge,” said Carsten Gundlach, a mathematical physicist at the University of Southampton. Black holes are the enigmatic extremes of the cosmos. Within them, matter is packed so tightly that, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity…

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Can Information Escape a Black Hole?

Janna Levin — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 13:09:00 +0000

Nothing escapes a black hole … or does it? In the 1970s, the physicist Stephen Hawking described a subtle process by which black holes can “evaporate,” with some particles evading gravitational oblivion. That phenomenon, now dubbed Hawking radiation, seems at odds with general relativity, and it raises an even weirder question: If particles can escape, do they preserve any information about the…

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