| Milky Way's black hole appears to be getting hungrier | | | UCLA astronomers announced last week that - in May - they caught the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy having an unusually large meal of interstellar gas and dust. And they don’t yet understand why. Why did the area just outside the black hole’s event horizon - its point of no return - suddenly become dramatically brighter? What did the black hole ingest, and why at that time? Andrea Ghez, head of UCLA's Galactic Center Group, commented, "We have never seen anything like this in the 24 years we have studied the supermassive black hole. It’s usually a pretty quiet, wimpy black hole on a diet. We don’t know what is driving this big feast." Read more and watch a video. | | |
| A distant galaxy's black hole seen to flare unexpectedly | | | Astronomers now call recently-discovered flares from supermassive black holes in distant galaxies quasi-periodic eruptions. "Giant black holes regularly flicker like a candle but the rapid, repeating changes seen in GSN 069 from December onwards are something completely new," said one scientist. Read more. | | |
What we're reading From MIT News … Ringing of newborn black hole detected for 1st time | | | If Einstein’s theory of general relativity holds true, then a black hole born from the collision of 2 other black holes should “ring.” It should produce gravitational waves much as a struck bell emits reverberating sound waves. Now, physicists from MIT and elsewhere have studied the ringing of an infant black hole, and found that the pattern of this ringing matches Einstein's predictions. Read more. | | |
Last week's exoplanet controversy Is K2-18b really a habitable super-Earth? | | | It was exciting last week when scientists announced water vapor in a super-Earth's atmosphere. But, even as the announcement came, other scientists were cautioning that the planet - K2-18b - is probably less like a super-Earth and more like a mini-Neptune. Read more. | | |
