Black Holes

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.

Back when single-celled organisms ruled Earth, a gigantic black hole lurking quietly at the center of a distant galaxy dismantled and devoured a star. On Wednesday, astronomers reported that they watched the whole thing unfold over a period of 15 months starting in 2010, the first time such an event had been witnessed in great detail from start to finish. "The star got so close that it was ripped apart by the gravitational force of the black hole," said Johns Hopkins University astronomer Suvi Gezari, lead author of a paper about the observations that was published online by the journal Nature.

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow Bantam: 200 pp., $28 Robert Oppenheimer was fond of proposing that physics and poetry were becoming indistinguishable. In "The Grand Design," Cambridge theorist Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow seem to suggest that physics and metaphysics are also growing closer. They point out that the unified field theory that physicists, including Einstein, spent the better part of the 20th century trying to construct, probably can't exist.

Of all the hangovers from the George W. Bush years, the thorniest may be what to do about the U.S. military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There are still 171 detainees at Guantanamo and little consensus on what to do with them. Last spring, President Obama announced the resumption of military trials for some of those charged with participating in the 9/11 attacks. These trials, known as military commissions, have been stalled for years by legal challenges. Recently, the official in charge of the Guantanamo prison, Rear Adm. David Woods, issued a draft order that compounds these challenges.

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.

NASA's Swift spacecraft has captured what scientists believe to be the "birth cry" of a black hole caused by the collision of two neutron stars a billion light-years from Earth. The discovery, announced Tuesday, is the best evidence so far that scientists may have found what causes short bursts of high-energy gamma rays, one of the most powerful sources of electromagnetic radiation in the universe.

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."

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.

For the first time, astronomers have seen a super-massive black hole releasing energy into the gases around it. The discovery indicates that the black hole is spinning rapidly, so that its magnetic fields squeeze surrounding gas clouds, heating them and causing them to glow more brightly and release X-ray energy. The black hole is called MCG-6-30-15, and it lies more than 100 million light-years from Earth.

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.

For the first time, astronomers say they've borne witness to a supermassive black hole consuming a star. Two papers released Wednesday by the journal Nature describe powerful blasts of radiation whose brightness and behavior can be explained only by a sun-sized star being torn apart by the gravitational forces of a black hole at the center of its galaxy, the authors say. Scientists believe they have seen the aftermath of such stellar violence...

Astronomers have discovered a hidden collection of supermassive, growing black holes dating back to the early universe -- showing, for the first time, that black holes populated the cosmos far earlier than thought. The findings, published online Wednesday in the journal Nature, could help scientists understand how these black holes are born, how big they grow and how galaxies develop with them. "We know the nearest galaxies, like our own Milky Way, all have supermassive black holes in the center," said lead author Ezequiel Treister, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii.

Software engineer Colby Gutierrez-Kraybill sat alone in an observatory in this volcanic valley near Mt. Shasta, staring out a picture window at storm clouds gathering over the world's largest instrument to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He had reason to look forlorn, surrounded by empty bookshelves, unmarked chalkboards and rows of tables where scientists from around the world once argued over the best direction to aim 42 radio telescopes designed to act as an enormous ear capable of scanning more than a million stars over 10 billion radio frequencies.

A mysterious object that is eating interstellar gas and emitting X-rays in a telltale pattern is almost certainly a very young black hole ? the first one people have been able to observe at such an early stage, scientists said Monday. An amateur astronomer first spotted the object 31 years ago, when it was a star in the process of exploding into a supernova. Since then, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes have documented that X-rays have been emitted from the former star at a surprisingly steady rate over a 12-year period from 1995 to 2007.

The Grand Design Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow Bantam: 200 pp., $28 Robert Oppenheimer was fond of proposing that physics and poetry were becoming indistinguishable. In "The Grand Design," Cambridge theorist Stephen Hawking and Caltech physicist Leonard Mlodinow seem to suggest that physics and metaphysics are also growing closer. They point out that the unified field theory that physicists, including Einstein, spent the better part of the 20th century trying to construct, probably can't exist.

For all their pull on the imagination, black holes have always seemed somewhat sedate -- passive one-way portals that swallow light and anything else that come within gravitational grabbing distance. But recent observations by a group of UCLA astronomers of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way have found that the path to oblivion is surprisingly churned up -- more like a tornado than a funnel.

Big black holes sing bass. One particularly monstrous black hole has probably been humming B flat for billions of years -- but at a pitch no human could hear, let alone sing, astronomers said Tuesday. "The intensity of the sound is comparable to human speech," said Andrew Fabian of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, England. But the pitch of the sound is about 57 octaves below middle C.

The Fourth Annual Greek Film Festival opens at the Egyptian Theatre on Friday with the U.S. premiere of Vardis Marinakis' 2009 love story "Black Field . " The festivities conclude Sunday with the U.S. premiere of Fillipos Tsito's 2009 drama "Plato's Academy" and an awards ceremony. http://www.lagff.org. Honoring Richard Benjamin; 'The Black Hole' Screenwriter Larry Karaszweski's latest offering at the American Cinematheque's Aero Theatre on Friday is all about actor-director Richard Benjamin.

A federal appeals court has ruled that, unlike inmates at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, some 800 prisoners held at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan may not challenge their confinement by seeking writs of habeas corpus. The decision may be a fair reading of Supreme Court precedents, but it shouldn't be taken as a blank check for treating the Bagram airfield as the sort of legal black hole Guantanamo was before the courts intervened. In a 2008 decision granting habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy stressed that Guantanamo was an area over which the United States had "total military and civil control."