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Filtering by Tag: Blackhole
This is the heart of darkness.
The gravity of the blackhole is so great it casts a ‘shadow’ 2.5 times larger than itself (as defined by its event horizon) against the glowing material swirling into its maw.
That darkness is the size of the solar system but even so 6.5 billion Sun’s worth of mass crushes up pretty small when you’re a black hole.
Read MoreOne of the oldest questions in the study of Reionisation, the few hundred million years in which almost all of the hydrogen in the Universe was ionised effectively at once, is simple - where does the UV light to ionise the gas come from? One very popular idea is blackholes, or rather the accretion disks around them, where material swirls around the gravitational plughole become incredibly hot and bright in UV / X-ray emission. This fantastic work by Yuxiang Qin used DRAGONS universes to show that there simply isn't enough of these sources, known as AGN or Quasars, to do the job - or at least not if you want to match the number of blackholes that exist today. That's because to be bright, and reionise the universe, they have to feed a lot and in the process grow too large relative to what we see today. This work undoubtedly disappointed some Quasar fans out there, but that's the beauty of science, the facts don't care what you might hope and you have to follow the results to their conclusion.
Read MoreBlackholes can lie dormant for decades or more, supermassive blackholes like the one in the centre of our galaxy can silently wait for millions of years, before flaring into life as the brightest objects in the sky thanks to accreting material swirling around them glowing X-ray hot.
Read MoreA Russian spacecraft is spinning out of control and I get to rant about the awesome physics of Interstellar too. Fun chat on the couch.
Read MoreThe tricky issue of science funding in Australia, which thankfully was soon rectified (for a year or two) after this broadcast. I also got to chat about Blackholes which is far more fun but without the funding we couldn't actually study these beasts so the two issues go hand in hand.
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