“We knew that two stars had to be involved in such an explosion, and that one of them had to be a white dwarf,” says Dan Maoz, professor of physics and astronomy at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and coauthor of this soon-to-be-published paper on the discovery. “But there were two possibilities for what the second star is, which is what we sought to discover.”
Oxygen Detected in Atmosphere of Saturn’s Moon Dione: Discovery Could Mean Ingredients for Life Are Abundant On Icy Space Bodies
“Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have found a cluster of young, blue stars encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole ever discovered. The presence of the star cluster suggests that the black hole was once at the core of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy. The discovery of the black hole and the star cluster has important implications for understanding the evolution of supermassive black holes and galaxies.”
"The earlier concept of a universe made up of physical particles interacting according to fixed laws is no longer tenable. It is implicit in present findings that action rather than matter is basic; This is good news, for it is no longer appropriate to think of the universe as a gradually subsiding agitation of billiard balls. The universe, far from being a desert of inert particles, is a theatre of increasingly complex organization, a stage for development in which man has a definite place, without any upper limit to his evolution."
Arthur M. Young, The Reflexive Universe
"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."
Albert Einstein
This month, researchers are inaugurating the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that will try to take the first detailed pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
This observation would be a remarkable achievement, underscoring the progress that has been made in black-hole research in just the last few decades. As recently as the 1970s, astronomers still argued over whether black holes were theoretical constructs or real physical objects. They now have ample evidence that black holes are not only real, but abundant in the cosmos.
Here on Earth, advanced computer simulations have given astronomers a wealth of information, leading theoretical physicist Kip Thorne of Caltech to suggest that black-hole research is entering a new golden age.
“There is now a program of observations that I expect will bring us some big surprises and hopefully validate the predictions from these simulations,” he said.
Yet it’s still strange to imagine what the area around a black hole looks like. After all, a black hole is an object from which nothing, including light, can escape.
"To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light."
Jean Baudrillard
