Black Holes

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.

Stephen Hawking is the last of the 20th century's celebrity scientists. As did Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan and a handful of others, he has the rare gift of being able not only to think deeply about the mysteries of the cosmos, but also to capture the imagination of the public with his ideas.

John A. Wheeler, the fertile-minded physicist who popularized mind-stretching ideas about black holes, wormholes and quantum foam and also confounded admirers by helping to conceive some of the most potent weapons of mass destruction, has died. He was 96. Wheeler died Sunday morning of pneumonia at his home in Hightstown, N.J., according to his daughter, Alison Wheeler Lahnston. He had been in poor health for the last week.

The Black Hole War My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics Leonard Susskind Little, Brown: 480 pp., $27.99 -- IN A PACKED lecture hall at Columbia University in 1958 -- or so the story goes -- the eminent physicist Wolfgang Pauli was presenting a radical new theory. In the audience was Niels Bohr, another eminent physicist, who, at lecture's end, stood up and announced: "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.

For two decades, Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind battled cosmologist Stephen Hawking over the behavior of black holes. Hawking said that when black holes eat their fill, they disappear, taking with them everything they consumed over their billions of years of existence. Susskind found this idea so disturbing that he publicly declared war -- a conflict he describes in his new book, "The Black Hole War."

After 16 years of research, teams of American and European scientists have compiled the most complete portrait of the gigantic black hole at the center of the Milky Way, plotting its gravity-bending mass as being equivalent to a staggering 4 million suns. The researchers from Germany and UCLA also pinpoint the distance to the center of the galaxy at 27,000 light-years.

The universe has a gargantuan hole devoid of galaxies, stars, even dark matter, astronomers said Thursday. The University of Minnesota researchers said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they had no idea why it is there. "Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick.

Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to answer the cosmic question of where we come from. Planets and much on them, including humans, come from dust -- mostly from dying stars. But where did the dust that helped form those early stars come from? NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope may have spotted one of the answers. It's in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes. It identified large quantities of freshly made space dust in a quasar about 8 billion light-years from here.

An international team of scientists said Thursday that they have tracked down the origin of the mysterious "Oh-My-God" particle -- a cosmic ray bearing energies millions of times larger than the most powerful particle accelerator can produce on Earth.

Have you seen "Star Wars"? Did you notice that Darth Vader doesn't brush his teeth? It's true. Darth Vader has cavities. The problem is, dentists won't see him. They're scared of that light saber. So, when Vader needs a dental X-ray, he doesn't see a dentist, he sees a black hole. No kidding! Astronomers have discovered that black holes burp X-rays when they gobble up a star or a planet. It's like the X-ray machine in the dentist's office, only billions and billions of times stronger.