Scientists create electromagnetic “black hole” that sucks in surrounding light

September 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Mathematicians at the University of Leeds, UK, have determined that cosmic flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are produced by jets of plasma that originate from invading black holes. Gamma ray bursts are beams of high-energy radiation that are similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons.

September 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii has discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant supermassive black hole ever found. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun.

August 24th, 2009 LONDON - New estimates bys scientists suggest that the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy may be twice as big as originally thought, and possibly large enough to measure directly. M87 is 55 million light years away.

August 22nd, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, a team of scientists at Dartmouth university has proposed a new way of creating a reproduction black hole in the laboratory on a much-tinier scale than their celestial counterparts. The new method to create a tiny quantum sized black hole would allow researchers to better understand what physicist Stephen Hawking proposed more than 35 years ago: black holes are not totally void of activity; they emit photons, which is now known as Hawking radiation.

August 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists from Oregon State University in the US have created the first global three-dimensional map of electrical conductivity in the Earth's mantle, which suggests that that enhanced conductivity in certain areas of the mantle may signal the presence of water. According to scientists, those areas of high conductivity coincide with subduction zones - where tectonic plates are being subducted beneath the Earth's crust.

August 13th, 2009 LONDON - Invisible gateways, like the one in Harry Potter, are a step closer to reality, thanks to a new theory developed by scientists. With the help of a technique known as transformation optics, the research team from Hong Kong University and Fudan University in Shanghai has found a way to alter the pathway of light waves that could eventually allow them to develop portals that are invisible to the human eye, reports The Telegraph.

August 10th, 2009 LONDON - Computer simulations indicate that a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon, which would lead to the breakdown of the laws of physics. In 1969, physicist Roger Penrose postulated that every singularity, or black hole, must be shrouded by an event horizon from which nothing, including light, can escape.

July 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has imaged a coiled galaxy with an eye-like object at its center. The galaxy, called NGC 1097, is located 50 million light-years away.

July 15th, 2009 LONDON - New simulations have revealed that turbulence created by jets of material ejected from the disks of the Universe's largest black holes is responsible for halting star formation. The simulations have been made by Evan Scannapieco, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU) and Professor Marcus Brueggen of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany.

July 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research has determined that the tight cluster of stars surrounding a supermassive black hole after it has been violently kicked out of a galaxy represents a new kind of astronomical object and a fossil record of the kick. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal discusses the theoretical properties of "hypercompact stellar systems" and suggests that hundreds of these faint star clusters might be detected at optical wavelengths in our immediate cosmic environment.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using a worldwide combination of diverse telescopes, astronomers have discovered that a giant galaxy's bursts of very high energy gamma rays are coming from a region very close to the supermassive black hole at its core. The discovery provides important new information about the mysterious workings of the powerful "engines" in the centers of innumerable galaxies throughout the Universe.

June 17th, 2009 LONDON - A team of physicists have created an artificial black hole in their lab that traps sound instead of light, in an attempt to detect the theoretical Hawking radiation. The radiation, proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking more than 30 years ago, causes black holes to evaporate over time.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have used new computer modeling techniques to discover that the black hole at the heart of M87, one the largest nearby giant galaxies, is two to three times more massive than previously thought. The astronomers were Karl Gebhardt from the University of Texas at Austin and Jens Thomas from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

June 6th, 2009 LONDON - A new study has suggested that a wandering black hole may have torn apart a star to create a strange object that brightened mysteriously like a firefly and then faded from view in 2006. The object, called SCP 06F6, was first spotted in the constellation Bootes in February 2006 in a search for supernovae by the Hubble Space Telescope.

May 28th, 2009 PARIS - Astronomers have used new data from ESA's (European Space Agency's) XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, to probe closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy. The galaxy - known as 1H0707-495 - was observed during four 48-hr-long orbits of XMM-Newton around Earth, starting in January 2008.