merge
esiegel | August 21, 2012"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -Isaac Asimov
One of the most spectacular and successful ideas of the 20th Century was Einstein's General Relativity, or the idea that matter and energy determines the curvature of spacetime, and the curvature of spacetime in turn determines how gravitation works.
Image credit: Hyper-Mathematics - Uzayzaman / Spacetime.
From the orbits of planets to the bending of starlight, General Relativity governs all gravitational phenomena in the Universe, and accurately describes every observation we've…
esiegel | April 29, 2008No, not because it was too young to drink! Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics were looking at some X-ray objects, and discovered something really weird: a very bright X-ray source moving out of a galaxy at nearly 3,000 kilometers/second! This thing is a goner. If our Sun were moving at even one quarter of that speed, it would get thrown out of our galaxy.
Now, here's the kicker: this isn't just any old object getting tossed out of a galaxy, it is a huge black hole! How huge? About 300,000,000 times the mass of our Sun. You read that number right: 300,000,000…