"Sgr A*, the 4.6-million-solar-mass black hole that lies at the
center of the Milky Way, is normally a fairly quiet beast. The
black hole slowly feeds on accreting material in the galactic
center — but this food source is sparse, and Sgr A*’s...
By Nadia Zakamska, Member in the School of Natural Sciences:
"If you thought that the Nobel-Prize-winning LIGO discovery of
stellar mass black hole mergers was cool, just think about the
possibility of merging black holes with masses millions or...
Wormholes are spacetime connections between distant spacetime
regions. While some have speculated that they could
be used to travel faster than light, our current understanding
of general relativity and quantum matter seems...
Stargazers know all too well the challenges of observing the
night sky on a cloudy evening. Fortunately, waiting a night or two
can help to resolve the issue. But what happens if these clouds are
light years away and lie seemingly dormant in the...
It is well known that the expansion of the universe is
accelerating due to a mysterious dark energy. Within galaxies,
stars also experience an acceleration, though this is due to some
combination of dark matter and the stellar density. In a new...
"Within our galaxy, there are thousands of stars that orbit the
center of the Milky Way at high velocities. On occasion, some of
them pick up so much speed that they break free of our galaxy and
become intergalactic objects. Because of the extreme...
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what might the first
horizon-scale image of a black hole tell us? A new paper by
researchers from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration,
which famously imaged M87’s central black hole, has provided
a...
In a paper recently published by Science,
Harold F. Linder Professor Alondra
Nelson and her co-authors address ethical concerns related to
the methods of computational social science (CSS) and the optimal
conditions for the utilization of data-based...
What would it be like to live next to a supermassive black hole?
While difficult to imagine, a recent simulation modeling the
central region of the Milky Way galaxy tells a fascinating story
that can be safely enjoyed from the Earth 26,000...
In a new study of axion motion, researchers, including Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study Member Keisuke Harigaya, propose a scenario known as “kinetic misalignment” that greatly strengthens the case for axion/dark matter equivalence.
