Astronomers today believe that Cassiopeia A might have been a rare killer type 11 star -a core collapsed hypernova that generates deadly GRBs, gamma ray bursts that may leading astronomers and physicists believe may be resonsible for destroying much of existing life throughout the billions of galaxies that populate the universe.  While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion [...]

Scientists have determined the mass of the largest things that could possibly exist in our universe.  New results have placed an upper limit on the current size of black holes – and at fifty billion suns it’s pretty damn big.  That’s a hundred thousand tredagrams, and you’ll never get the chance to use that word in relation to anything else. Black holes are regions of space where matter is so dense that regular physics just breaks down.  You might think physical laws are [...]

Scientists have located a giant 13-billion year old galaxy at the edge of the observable universe.  Detecting this huge galaxy  was a challenge because of the massive quantities of light coming from the black hole, and if you think you spotted two problems in that sentence, read on. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun. “It is [...]

“We think these unusual signatures can be explained by a white dwarf that strayed too close to a black hole and was torn apart by the extreme tidal forces.” Joel Bregman of the University of Michigan. See the original post here:  Image of the Day: A White Dwarf Swallowed by a Supermassive Black Hole

Some of the world’s leading string theorists -”the theory of everything”- believe that our entire universe exists in a black hole. In this bizarre view, the pre Big-Bang universe is vast, infinite, and stretching back indefinitely in time. Here is the original post:  Does the Universe Exist in a Black Hole?

Some of the world's leading string theorists -”the theory of everything”- believe that our entire universe exists in a black hole. In this bizarre view, the pre Big-Bang universe is vast, infinite, and stretching back indefinitely in time. Meanwhile, scientists at Princeton and Cambridge say that most of the universe is regularly destroyed.  It's space-time-twisted into black holes, in fact, which is about as utterly destroyed as you can get without pissing off Zeus.  In [...]

Scientists have spotted a giant galaxy at the edge of the observable universe.  Detecting this huge galaxy (the same size as the Milky Way) was a challenge because of the massive quantities of light coming from the black hole, and if you think you spotted two problems in that sentence, read on. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun “It [...]

Scientists have located a giant 13-billion year old galaxy at the edge of the observable universe.  Detecting this huge galaxy  was a challenge because of the massive quantities of light coming from the black hole, and if you think you spotted two problems in that sentence, read on. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun. “It is [...]

The biggest things in the universe just got bigger – or rather, they’ve always been bigger and we somehow missed it up to now.  Supercomputer simulations of galactic core black holes indicate that instead of being a mere two billion times the mass of the sun, so insignificant you’d surely lose them if you sneezed, some could be as large as six billion suns -not including the “dark halo” that surrounds the Milky Way,  which is more than ten times as much mass as all [...]

ovember 25, 200   The Large Hadron Collider is spooling back up to science-speeds, circulating particle beams last week and looking at ramping up the power to productive levels even now, and you know what that means?  No, not particle physics, or an increases in human knowledge, or even pieces of a new understanding of how the universe operates – it’s time for the more vapid scaremongering!  Which is why we’re lucky we’ve got Gizmodo to give such a perfect example! Their  [...]