Black Holes

Humans are on the cusp of discovering how the universe works on its biggest and smallest scales, Stephen Hawking said during a lecture Tuesday in Los Angeles. The renowned theoretical physicist made his name studying black holes, massive structures that anchor galaxies and whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. But on Tuesday, he delved into the world of microscopic cell biology to see first-hand how researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute are using stem cells to develop treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, the disease Hawking was diagnosed with in 1963.

A few Caltech students had the chance to pick famed physicist Stephen Hawking's brain on black holes and other topics after he gave a lecture on campus Tuesday. The questions were submitted in advance; Hawking answered through a speech-generating device. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 1963 and has spent much of his life in a wheelchair. One Caltech student asked Hawking after the lecture if he believed in a theory that our universe was caused by a black hole in another universe.

NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope is providing fresh views of oddly bright black holes and breathtaking supernovae, scientists said Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach. NuSTAR mission scientists released high-energy X-ray images of two strangely bright black holes in the arms of spiral galaxy IC 342 about 7 million light years away and of Cassiopeia A, the shell of an exploded star, known as a supernova, just 11,000 light years away. Since its launch last summer , the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has been snapping shots at energies up to 79 kiloelectron volts - far beyond the roughly 10 KeV limit of other X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Clive Svendsen doesn't get rattled easily, but the neurobiologist couldn't help sweating when Stephen Hawking paid a visit to his lab this week. Hawking is one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists. He pioneered groundbreaking research into how particles behave around black holes and deduced that black holes spit out radiation as they swallow up matter. He's also credited with teaching millions about the mysteries of the cosmos through his books, including the bestseller "A Brief History of Time.

Astronomers think they have finally solved the cosmic chicken-and-egg problem of what came first -- the giant black holes lying at the center of many big galaxies or the galaxies that feed them? The answer: the black holes. The finding, which surprised even the scientists involved, implies that black holes grow the galaxies surrounding them, like a garden springing from a single seed or a man growing a suit of clothes.

Astrophysicists scanning the heavens have clocked a new cosmological record: the two biggest black holes ever detected — one about 10 billion times the mass of our sun and the second as much as twice the size of the first. To be described in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, these behemoth black holes are nearly double the size of the previous record-holder and — strangely — are far more massive than they should be given the size of the galaxies they reside within. For that reason, they stand to teach scientists much about how galaxies form and grow, astronomers said.

NASA will be launching a new telescope expected to bring black holes and supernovae into unprecedented focus, mission scientists announced Wednesday. The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, a mission to hunt for black holes, is scheduled to launch no sooner than June 13 from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, located north of the equator. It will look at some of the most mysterious phenomena in the universe, from the high-speed particle jets that blast from black holes to the remnants of exploded stars known as supernovae.

A once-canceled space telescope is set to launch into Earth orbit, where it will search for undiscovered black holes in the Milky Way and at the hearts of other galaxies. The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array will hunt for black holes that have been obscured by the dust and gas floating through space and measure how fast some of them are spinning. NuSTAR will also examine with fresh eyes the remnants of exploded stars known as supernovae. "It's a very exciting mission," said Roger Blandford, director of the Kavli Institute of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University and a member of the NuSTAR science team.

Nature may make black holes with cookie-cutter precision, according to an astronomer who has found such uniformity in these mysterious objects that he suggests their size may be controlled by some basic law of physics. Yale University astronomer Charles Bailyn, who gave a report on his black-hole findings at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Stephen Hawking formally presented a paper Wednesday that said he was wrong about black holes for almost 30 years. The renowned Cambridge University physicist's paper argued that black holes, the celestial vortexes formed from collapsed stars, preserve traces of objects swallowed up and eventually could spit bits out "in a mangled form."

Humans are on the cusp of discovering how the universe works on its biggest and smallest scales, Stephen Hawking said during a lecture Tuesday in Los Angeles. The renowned theoretical physicist made his name studying black holes, massive structures that anchor galaxies and whose gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. But on Tuesday, he delved into the world of microscopic cell biology to see first-hand how researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Regenerative Medicine Institute are using stem cells to develop treatments for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, the disease Hawking was diagnosed with in 1963.

Scientists and space junkies got some good news from NASA on Friday: The space agency announced it would keep the Hubble Space Telescope 's science operations going at least through April 30, 2016. The three-year extension will cost NASA $76 million, according to the announcement . The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore manages Hubble's science operations for NASA through a contract with the Assn. of Universities for Research in Astronomy. PHOTOS: Hubble's Brilliant Images of Space Launched in 1990 from the shuttle Discovery, Hubble has contributed to many scientific breakthroughs . My personal favorite is the 1998 discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, pushed apart by a mysterious force called dark energy.

Saturday marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the quasar - an extremely bright object powered by matter falling into a super-massive black hole lying in the heart of a galaxy. First found in 1963, these strange sources of radio waves initially stumped astronomers: They shone as sharply and intensely as nearby stars, but they appeared to be moving away from Earth far too fast to be in our own Milky Way. Scientists called them quasi-stellar radio sources - or quasars for short.

Black holes may have given up some secrets of their growth thanks to the sleuthing of two X-ray space telescopes. The findings have solved a long-standing mystery about a supermassive black hole's spin, finding that some of them can whirl very close to what the speed of light allows. NASA's X-ray telescope NuSTAR teamed up with the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space telescope and found that the black hole anchoring nearby galaxy NGC 1365, sitting about 56 million light-years away and containing the mass of 2 million suns, is spinning at 84% of the maximum possible rate, according to a study released Wednesday in the journal Nature.

NASA's NuSTAR X-ray telescope is providing fresh views of oddly bright black holes and breathtaking supernovae, scientists said Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Long Beach. NuSTAR mission scientists released high-energy X-ray images of two strangely bright black holes in the arms of spiral galaxy IC 342 about 7 million light years away and of Cassiopeia A, the shell of an exploded star, known as a supernova, just 11,000 light years away. Since its launch last summer , the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array has been snapping shots at energies up to 79 kiloelectron volts - far beyond the roughly 10 KeV limit of other X-ray telescopes such as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

Astronomers said Wednesday that a burst of X-rays from the galaxy Andromeda appeared to have been created by a microquasar - a black hole gobbling up material from a companion star. The discovery could help scientists study the physics of the massive black holes at the centers of galaxies, they said. Andromeda is about 2.5 million light years from Earth. The newly found microquasar, dubbed XMMU J004243.6+412519, is about the mass of 10 suns and was the first discovered outside of the Milky Way, the team said.  The scientists initially detected it on Jan. 15, then continued watching it with several different telescopes that detect X-rays or radio waves.

The universe appears to contain far more black holes than previously known, from ancient monsters lurking in galaxies at the edge of space-time to tiny "naked" holes drifting invisibly through the void. And the exotic objects may have played a crucial role in shaping the visible cosmos. Those are the conclusions of new research released Thursday from several separate groups of astronomers studying the sky with half a dozen telescopes.

Using powerful radio telescopes, scientists have captured a supermassive black hole just as it was belching out a jet of supercharged particles, offering a first look at how these cosmic jets are formed, the scientific team reported Thursday in the journal Nature. Supermassive black holes are believed to form the core of many galaxies, and astronomers have long suspected they eject jets of particles at nearly the speed of light. A kind of supermassive black hole known as a blazar was suspected of spewing out a pair of forceful streams of plasma 950 million light years from Earth.

Astronomers on the hunt for supermassive black holes have discovered one so monstrous that its mass dominates the central hub of its galaxy in a way that defies scientists' expectations about how typical black holes behave. Described in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, the black hole may push theorists to revamp their ideas of how these mysterious structures grow and evolve. Astrophysicists said they were scratching their heads at how thoroughly this gargantuan black hole - seated in the galaxy NGC 1277, about 220 million light-years away - hogs its galactic bed. Supermassive black holes typically account for just 0.1% of the mass in a galaxy's stellar bulge, the cluster of older stars huddled around the center.