On February 5, 1963, Maarten Schmidt unraveled the mystery of quasars and pushed back the edges of the known cosmos. His insight into quasars – the most distant and luminous objects known – has changed the way scientists view the universe. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/this-date-in-science-maartin-schmidt-discovers-first-known-quasar…
Tag: Black
A giant black hole suddenly went dark, and no one knows why
In 2018, one of the brightest X-ray lights in the sky went dark, and scientists still aren’t sure why. Source: https://www.livescience.com/black-hole-mysteriously-goes-dark.html
Two Google Engineers Resign Over Firing of AI Ethics Researcher Timnit Gebru
An engineering director and a software developer have quit Alphabet’s Google over the dismissal of AI researcher Timnit Gebru, a sign of the ongoing conflicts at the search giant over diversity and ethics. From a report: David Baker, a director focused on user safety, left Google last month after 16 years because Gebru’s exit “extinguished my desire to continue as a…
Robots Are Speeding Up the Most Boring Job In Astronomy
sciencehabit writes: The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has, for more than 20 years, pioneered collecting spectra from millions of astronomical objects, from nearby stars to supermassive black holes. But this year, the survey is making a change: Instead of employing a small team of technicians for the daily chore of plugging optical fibers into preprepared plates so that — when…
CNN: Tesla’s Net Profit ‘Doesn’t Come From Selling Cars’
“Tesla posted its first full year of net income in 2020 — but not because of sales to its customers,” reports CNN: Eleven states require automakers sell a certain percentage of zero-emissions vehicles by 2025. If they can’t, the automakers have to buy regulatory credits from another automaker that meets those requirements — such as Tesla, which exclusively sells electric cars….
JADES will go deeper than the Hubble Deep Fields
Astronomers announced this month that a new deep-field survey called JADES will be carried out with the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble’s much-anticipated successor. The Webb is due to launch later this year. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/jades-deep-field-surveys-epoch-of-1st-galaxies…
Tesla Model S Gets a Radically Redesigned Interior and 520-Mile Range
During its fourth-quarter earnings announcement, Tesla unveiled the long-rumored refresh for its Model S sedan. CNET reports: On the outside, the Model S has a new front bumper with slightly different intakes, a tweaked rear diffuser and new 19- and 21-inch wheel designs. All of the exterior trim is now finished in black to match the Model Y, but the paint…
Extreme black holes have hair that can be combed
Black holes are considered amongst the most mysterious objects in the universe. Part of their intrigue arises from the fact that they are actually among the simplest solutions to Einstein’s field equations of general relativity. In fact, black holes can be fully characterized by only three physical quantities: their mass, spin and charge. Since they have no additional “hairy” attributes to…
When galaxies collide: Models suggest galactic collisions can starve massive black holes
It was previously thought that collisions between galaxies would necessarily add to the activity of the massive black holes at their centers. However, researchers have performed the most accurate simulations of a range of collision scenarios and have found that some collisions can reduce the activity of their central black holes. The reason is that certain head-on collisions may in fact…
Aliens could be sucking energy from black holes. That may be how we’ll find them.
A new study examines a potential mechanism for extracting energy from a rotating black hole, and suggests it may account for some of the energetic flares observed near these massive disruptions in time and space. Source: https://www.livescience.com/aliens-suck-black-hole-energy.html