Lifeboat Foundation

We’ll never be able to extract any information about what’s inside a black hole’s event horizon. Here’s why a singularity is inevitable.

An older universe existed before the Big Bang, and proof for its existence can still be found in black holes, according to a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. Sir Roger Penrose made the assertion after receiving the award for advances in Einstein’s general theory of relativity and proof of black hole existence. Sir Roger contends that inexplicable regions of electromagnetic radiation in the sky, known as ‘Hawking Points,’ represent vestiges of an earlier universe.

Scientists have made it possible to listen to the light echoes of a black hole by turning astronomical data into souns.

An international team of researchers are suggesting that our understanding of the origins of our universe may need some updates.

As detailed in a new paper published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, they say the universe may have begun with a “Big Bounce” rather than a Big Bang.

In other words, the cosmos may have been born following of the end of a previous cosmological phase — a bounce — and not the result of space-time inflating exponentially into existence.

Researchers have proposed what’s perhaps the most exotic explanation to date for the source of the universe’s seed magnetic field: cosmic strings.

Start at the Big Bang…

“The map of the observable Universe” takes viewers on a 13.7-billion-year-old tour of the cosmos from the present to the moments after the Big Bang.

As well as admiring beautiful pictures of space, you can also listen to those pictures via sonifications. These take images and translate them into eerie sounds to illustrate the wonderful and strange phenomena of our universe. NASA’s latest sonification illustrates the rings of X-rays that have been observed echoing around a black hole in the V404 Cygni system.

The sonification was made using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, both of which look in the X-ray wavelength. The data from the optical wavelength come from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii. Taken together, you can see how the X-ray bursts propagate outward from a central point which is the black hole. The black hole itself remains invisible, as it absorbs all light.

However, even though black holes are themselves invisible, the material around them can glow brightly. As material like dust and gas is attracted to the black hole due to gravity, it joins into a swirling disk around the black hole called an accretion disk. This material rubs together and creates heat due to friction, and can become so hot that it glows.

If wormholes in space exist, they look a lot like black holes from a particular angle, physicists claim, raising the possibility we’ve seen examples of this long-sought phenomenon without knowing it.

For something that emits no light that we can detect, black holes just love to cloak themselves in radiance.

Some of the brightest light in the Universe comes from supermassive black holes, in fact. Well, not actually the black holes themselves; it’s the material around them as they actively slurp down vast amounts of matter from their immediate surroundings.

Among the brightest of these maelstroms of swirling hot material are galaxies known as blazars. Not only do they glow with the heat of a swirling coat, but they also channel material into ‘blazing’ beams that zoom through the cosmos, shedding electromagnetic radiation at energies that are hard to fathom.