Lifeboat Foundation

The blue and orange stars of the faint galaxy named NGC 2188 sparkle in this image taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Although NGC 2188 appears at first glance to consist solely of a narrow band of stars, it is classified by astronomers as a barred spiral galaxy. It appears this way from our viewpoint on Earth as the center and spiral arms of the galaxy are tilted away from us, with only the very narrow outer edge of the galaxy’s disk visible to us. Astronomers liken this occurrence to turning a dinner plate in your hands so you see only its outer edge. The true shape of the galaxy was identified by studying the distribution of the stars in the inner central bulge and outer disk and by observing the stars’ colors.

NGC 2188 is estimated to be just half the size of our Milky Way, at 50,000 light-years across, and it is situated in the constellation of Columba (the Dove). Named in the late 1500s after Noah’s dove in biblical stories, the small constellation consists of many faint yet beautiful stars and astronomical objects.

Text credit: ESA (European Space Agency) Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully.

The detectors have sensed dozens of such cataclysms over the past 5 years, but the one on 21 May 2019 was different. Not only was it the most powerful and distant merger ever seen, but the resulting black hole also belongs to a class of long-sought middleweight black holes, members of the LIGO-Virgo collaboration report today in two new studies. Puzzlingly, however, the two black holes that merged are heavier than expected: Their masses fall in a gap in which theorists … See More.

Black holes can expel a thousand times more matter than they capture. The mechanism that governs both ejection and capture is the accretion disk, a vast mass of gas and dust spiraling around the black hole at extremely high speeds. The disk is hot and emits light as well as other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Part of the orbiting matter is pulled toward the center and disappears behind the event horizon, the threshold beyond which neither matter nor light can escape. Another, much larger, part is pushed further out by the pressure of the radiation emitted by the disk itself.

Every galaxy is thought to have a supermassive black hole at its center, but not all galaxies have, or still have, accretion disks. Those that do are known as active galaxies, on account of their active galactic nuclei. The traditional model posits two phases in the matter that accumulates in the central region of an active galaxy: a high-speed ionized gas outflow of matter ejected by the nucleus, and slower molecules that may flow into the nucleus.

A new model that integrates the two phases into a single scenario has now been put forward by Daniel May, a postdoctoral researcher in the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences (IAG-USP) in Brazil. “We found that the molecular phase, which appears to have completely different dynamics from the ionized phase, is also part of the outflow. This means there’s far more matter being blown away from the center, and the active galactic nucleus plays a much more important role in the structuring of the galaxy as a whole,” May told Agência FAPESP.

Black holes are getting stranger — even to astronomers. They’ve now detected the signal from a long ago violent collision of two black holes that created a new one of a size that had never been seen before.

“It’s the biggest bang since the Big Bang observed by humanity,” said Caltech physicist Alan Weinstein, who was part of the discovery team.

Black holes are compact regions of space so densely packed that not even light can escape. Until now, astronomers only had observed them in two general sizes. There are “small” ones called stellar black holes that are formed when a star collapses and are about the size of small cities. And there are supermassive black holes that are millions, maybe billions, of times more massive than our sun and around which entire galaxies revolve.

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Ancient cultures long thought the Sun had a mind of it’s own, but could life form in stars by nature or exist by artificial origins, and what would star with a mind of its own be like?

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Support my work on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/melodysheep | Get the soundtrack: https://bit.ly/2HKl9fi | How’s it all gonna end? This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be.

We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos — to name a few.

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“Gravitational waves from what could be the most massive black hole merger yet has been detected by researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) and its discovery is also raising questions about how massive black holes are formed.

When scientists made the first direct detection of gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger in February 2016, not only did they prove Einstein right, they also discovered another curious quirk; the audibl… See More.

The detection of the heaviest black hole merger to date is also the first clear detection of an ” intermediate-mass” black hole.

Get ready to check into the Multiverse, fellow travelers, and enjoy all the sights, sounds and experiences that the 2020 Burning Man has to offer.

Scientists suggest that a counter-intuitive, hypothetical species of black holes may negate the standard model of cosmology, where dark energy is an inherent and constant property of spacetime that will result in an eventual cold death of the universe. “It’s the big elephant in the room,” says Claudia de Rham, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London about dark energy, the mysterious, elusive phenomena that pushes the cosmos to expand so rapidly and which is estimated to account for 70% of the contents of the universe. “It’s very frustrating.”

Generic Objects of Dark Energy

Astronomers have known for two decades that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, but the physics of this expansion remains a mystery. In 1966, Erast Gliner, a young physicist at the Ioffe Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, proposed an alternative hypothesis that very large stars should collapse into what could be called Generic Objects of Dark Energy (GEODEs). These appear to be black holes when viewed from the outside but, unlike black holes, they contain dark energy instead of a singularity.