Scientists propose new way to reproduce a black hole in the lab

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 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.

June 27th, 2009 LONDON - In a new research, scientists have found that the ozone hole is responsible for the drop in carbon dioxide (CO2) absorption in the Southern Ocean, which is considered as a major carbon sink. In theory, oceans should absorb more CO2 as levels of the gas in the atmosphere rise.

June 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers at McMaster University have discovered the existence of two types of males of a fiercely invasive fish spreading through the Great Lakes, which might help explain how they rapidly reproduce. They revealed that in addition to round goby males, which guard the nest from predators and look after their offspring, there exists what scientists call "sneaker" males - little males that look like females and sneak into the nests of the larger males.

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.

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.

May 8th, 2009 Obama to propose $1.25B for black farmersWASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is proposing that the government provide $1.25 billion to settle discrimination claims by black farmers against the Agriculture Department. The White House said the money would be included in the president's 2010 budget request to be unveiled Thursday.

April 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New calculations by scientists suggest that hundreds of massive rogue black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way. The calculations have been made by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

March 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have suggested that a special class of black holes have a mechanism for regulating the rate at which they grow, and can shut off the high-speed jets they produce. Some stellar-mass black holes launch powerful jets of particles and radiation, like seen in quasars, and are called "micro-quasars".

March 24th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University have observed the largest exploding star yet seen, which is the size of 50 suns. While exploding stars, called supernovae, have been viewed with everything from the naked eye to high-tech research satellites, no one had directly observed what happens when a really huge star blows up.