‘Very massive stars’ shed enormous mass before collapsing into black holes: Study

‘Very massive stars’ shed enormous mass before collapsing into black holes: Study

‘Very massive stars’ or ‘very luminous stars’ may be emitting a significantly higher amount of material during their lifespan. A new study suggests that the immensity of these materials could be much higher than previously thought.  Very luminous stars are those stars that have over 100 times the mass of the Sun. Despite having a […]

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Can you travel back to the past? Films say yes, science isn’t so sure

Can you travel back to the past? Films say yes, science isn’t so sure

Time travel has been part of the popular imagination for long. From science fiction classics like The Time Machine and Back to the Future to contemporary films like Interstellar played on the notion of slipping through time — whether to witness the past, and even be a part of it, or to glimpse the future. […]

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Black holes: How Chandrasekhar saw the end of light

Black holes: How Chandrasekhar saw the end of light

In 1930, a young Indian physicist named Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar boarded a ship from India to England. Just 19 years old, he spent much of the long voyage working out the mathematics of what happens when a star collapses under its own gravity.  What he found was shocking: stars above a certain mass couldn’t stop their […]

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Researchers create map of Milky Way’s graveyard of dead stars

Researchers create map of Milky Way’s graveyard of dead stars

Researchers have created a chart of the corpses of massive stars that have since collapsed into black holes and neutron stars. The study reveals that this “galactic graveyard” stretches three times the height of the Milky Way and that close to one-third of the objects have been flung out from the galaxy. “These compact remnants […]

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Black holes may hide a mind-bending secret about our universe

Black holes may hide a mind-bending secret about our universe

For the past century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself. On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, quiver like a bowl of […]

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Study tracks new source for radio emissions from black hole core

Study tracks new source for radio emissions from black hole core

A group of Indian astronomers has claimed to have found clues of possible sources for origin of radio emissions emerging from central regions of black holes. Some of the black holes emit radio emissions, but their source has largely been not fully understood. Though many previous studies have linked multiple sources for the emissions, this […]

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ESO image captures galaxy with closest discovered pair of supermassive black holes

ESO image captures galaxy with closest discovered pair of supermassive black holes

The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope has captured an image of a spectacular galactic collision. NGC 7727, a massive galaxy, was created from an event that started around a billion years ago: the merger of two galaxies. And at the centre of NGC 7727 lies the closest pair of supermassive black holes ever […]

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Scientists plan to use colliding black holes to measure how fast universe is expanding

Scientists plan to use colliding black holes to measure how fast universe is expanding

Next to nothing can escape the strong gravitational pull of a black hole but now scientists are planning to use the collisions of black holes to understand the age of the universe and its evolution. In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, University of Chicago astrophysicists have developed a method for using pairs […]

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