April 2019
LISA Pathfinder – paving the way for future studies of the gravitational universe
... ripples in the curvature of space-time produced by accelerations of massive celestial bodies such as orbiting pairs of black holes, compact binaries or other astrophysical objects. Albert Einstein postulated the existence of gravitational waves from...
March 2016
Gravitational waves provide new window on the universe
... small The final technique is called ringdown, which corresponds to changes in the resulting single black hole and can be calculated by using the black hole perturbation theory. In total 50 million CPU hours were used to work on this event, which...
12 February 2016
A scientific breakthrough as gravitational waves detected for the first time
... masses of ~36 and ~29 times greater than the mass of our Sun and while numerous black hole candidates have now been identified, black hole mergers have not previously been observed. “This is transformational,” said Prof Alberto Vecchio, of the...
13 August 2020
Fastest star in the galaxy is found, and potentially its a “squeezar”
... brightest members of that cluster found so far is S2. S2 made headlines when it helped scientists establish that a super massive black hole with a mass of about 4 million suns was was hiding at the centre of our galaxy. When it was discovered...
September 2017
Binary stars and their extraordinary lives
... lifetimes. We have seen binary stars and binary black holes merge in real time. With upcoming bigger and better... This has been proposed as an evolutionary route to making double black hole binaries, which can later merge into one with the emission ...
October 2018
The ethics of space exploration
... yet beautiful landscape. In my young mind, the Universe was home to all sorts of planets, stars, galaxies and black holes. It had produced life on our own blue planet but could also harbour life elsewhere – perhaps in a very...
