Results tagged “blackholes” from 60 Second Science

So I'm a technological optimist. By and large, I think that, ultimately, technology will solve all my problems. That is, of course, if it doesn't destroy the world first. Because, let's face it, science is kind of scary.

At the top of my list of things that frighten me (followed shortly by a super-flu that turns people into zombies) is the sort-of-fact that the Large Hadron Collider could spew out strangelets and turn the Earth into a black hole, summon aggressive time travelers from the future, or plop us into a mediocre sci-fi movie.

Thank the good lord Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho have their heads screwed on right. They've filed suit in a federal court in Honolulu to stop CERN from powering up the LHC until it's produced safety and environmental reports.

[Google News]

Continue reading 'Hawaiians sue to stop Large Hadron Collider / save the world' >

In the last few years, astronomers have identified 10 “hypervelocity” stars, which race away from the Milky Way at 10 times the speed of normal stars. Nine of these burning bullets are believed to have originated in our own galaxy. What about #10?

Yesterday, astronomers from the Carnegie Institution and Queen’s University Belfast announced that the stellar stranger isn’t from around here. The star is believed to be only about 35 million years old, but it’s about 100 million years away from the center of our galaxy. (They’re calling this the “paradox of youth.”) They estimate that the star is moving at about 1.6 million miles per hour.

How to explain the conflict between its time and position? The stargazers came up with two theories and finally settled on this one: they believe the young star “recently” escaped from the Large Magellanic Cloud (one of our nearest neighboring galaxies).
“Escaped” is probably the wrong word here—“violently expelled” is more like it.

Continue reading 'Interstellar fugitive?' >

Don't look now, but we might be surrounded by invisible black holes, wandering around just waiting to devour up stars and planets, argued Kelly Holley-Bockelmann of Vanderbilt University today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Holley-Bockelmann and others at the University of Michigan and Penn State University say these "intermediate mass" black holes are nearly always invisible--not to mention possibly, and controversially, non-existent--but the researchers have been running computer simulations to predict where they might wind up. Answer: Our backyard.

Continue reading 'Milky Way possibly chock full of rogue black holes, creamy nougat' >

Yet another thing they're trying to take away from The Man Upstairs. Why do you think it's called "the heavens," people? Puh-leeeeze. Anyway, scientists think they've found the origins of the super-high energy, ultra-awesome cosmic rays that are millions of times more powerful than the strongest particles created in particle accelerators on earth.

Researchers at the Pierre Auger Observatory, a complex of detectors spread over a Rhode Island-sized slice of the South American prairie, said the most likely source for these ultra-high-energy particles is a type of black hole found at the center of some galaxies.

Continue reading '"Oh-My-God" particles created by black holes, not God' >