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On Wednesday, Jan. 18, astronomers, physicists and scientists from related fields will convene in Tucson, Ariz. from across the world to discuss an endeavor that only a few years ago would have been regarded as nothing less than outrageous. The conference is organized by Dimitrios Psaltis, an associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, and Daniel Marrone, an assistant professor of astronomy at Steward Observatory. "Nobody has ever taken a picture of a black hole," Psaltis said. "We are going to do just that." "Even five years ago, such a proposal would not have seemed credible,"...

HERE IS OBAMA'S GALAXY DEDICATIONClick on the link in the description to see the galaxy.

A monstrous black hole at the heart of one galaxy is being devoured by a still larger black hole in another, scientists say. The discovery is the first of its kind. At the centers of virtually all large galaxies are black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. Models simulating the formation and growth of galaxies predict their black holes evolve as the galaxies do, by merging with others. Astronomers had witnessed the final stages of the merging of galaxies of equal mass, so-called major mergers. Minor mergers between galaxies and smaller companions should be even...

The soundtrack to the 1979 Disney space epic has been remastered, expanded, and now available from Disney and Intrada records. The music was composed by the late English movie music master John Barry, who is widely known for his work on the James Bond films between 1963 and 1987. Here is a suite of the OST on youtube

Brilliant, But Distant: Most Far-Flung Known Quasar Offers Glimpse into Early UniverseA gargantuan black hole has been spotted voraciously devouring material just 770 million years after the big bangBy John Matson June 29, 2011 GLOWING GOBBLER: An artist's conception of a quasar ionizing the hydrogen gas surrounding it.Image: Gemini Observatory Peering far across space and time, astronomers have located a luminous beacon aglow when the universe was still in its infancy. That beacon, a bright astrophysical object known as a quasar, shines with the luminosity of 63 trillion suns as gas falling into a supermassive black holes compresses, heats up...

Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe — a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called a quasar located 12 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence, researchers said. "Because the light we are seeing left this quasar more than 12 billion years ago, we are seeing water that was present only some 1.6 billion years after the beginning of...

Enlarge Image Breathing fire. A distant cosmic explosion detected 28 March (left) continues to put out a series of high-energy flares (right). Astronomers believe it's a star being consumed by a black hole 3.8 billion light-years away. Credit: (left, galaxy) ASA/Swift/Stefan Immler; (right, diagram) NASA/Swift/Penn State/J. Kennea Astronomers have observed possibly the biggest blast ever seen in the cosmos. When NASA's SWIFT space observatory first spotted it 10 days ago, observers thought it was a massive star blowing up as a supernova and expected it to fade within hours or even minutes. But the high-energy radiation from the source...

The end of a black hole’s evolution may be a mind-bending kind of space-time independent of time. A new study proposes a method to tell how far any black hole is from reaching this end state. Black holes are some of the weirdest things in the universe. They occur when mass is packed into a tiny volume, squished to its ultimate density. Though observations suggest black holes are prevalent in the universe, scientists still don't really understand what goes on inside them. The equations of general relativity usually used to understand the physics of the universe break down in these...

A hundred million years ago, a triple-star system was traveling through the bustling center of our Milky Way galaxy when it made a life-changing misstep. The trio wandered too close to the galaxy's giant black hole, which captured one of the stars and hurled the other two out of the Milky Way. Adding to the stellar game of musical chairs, the two outbound stars merged to form a super-hot, blue star. This story may seem like science fiction, but astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say it is the most likely scenario for a so-called hypervelocity star, known as HE...

Fewer riders took the Rail Runner Express in the last quarter of 2010, in part because there were fewer trains to take after Saturday service was reduced. New numbers show passengers in the last quarter of 2010 took 268,793 trips, compared with 301,386 in the fourth quarter of 2009. "(The difference) is almost entirely explained by our loss of ridership on the weekends," said Chris Blewett, the train project manager. October of last year saw a drop of 15.7 percent compared with the previous October, when the train offered a popular special service for the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. November...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US astronomers have discovered a huge black hole, a million times the mass of the sun, in a nearby galaxy -- a finding that could help better understand the origins of the universe. The announcement Monday by the American Astronomical Society said the surprise discovery in a so-called "dwarf" galaxy offers evidence that black holes -- regions of space where not even light can escape -- formed before the buildup of galaxies. "This galaxy gives us important clues about a very early phase of galaxy evolution that has not been observed before," said Amy Reines, a researcher...

For the first time, scientists believe they have witnessed the birth of a black hole. This Story Scientists witness the apparent birth of a black hole Animation: Supernova producing a black hole Interactive map of nearby black hole The evidence began arriving 30 years ago from a star 50 million light-years away that had imploded, setting into motion events that created a region where gravity is so great that nothing can escape, even light. The initial 1979 observation of the exploding star was made by an amateur astronomer from Western Maryland, but the profession's top scientists have studied it intently...

Chinese Lab Creates Artificial Black Hole October 14th, 2009, 12:48 GMT| By Tudor Vieru Far from being the only ones attempting to create an artificial black hole, Chinese researchers recently announced that they were able to produce the first artificial black hole for microwaves. If light in this energy spectrum enters the construct, it can no longer leave it, the team reports. Its accomplishment was made possible through the use of metamaterials, the same components that form the basis for invisibility cloaks and other optoelectronic devices, Technology Review reports. In charge of the Chinese team were scientists Qiang Cheng and...

A galactic "super-volcano" in the massive galaxy M87 is erupting and blasting gas outwards, as witnessed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and NSF's Very Large Array. The cosmic volcano is being driven by a giant black hole in the galaxy's center and preventing hundreds of millions of new stars from forming. Astronomers studying this black hole and its effects have been struck by the remarkable similarities between it and a volcano in Iceland that made headlines earlier this year. At a distance of about 50 million light years, M87 is relatively close to Earth and lies at the center of...

Mg20727753.800-1_300 NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory located a cosmic "ghost" that scientists think is evidence of a huge eruption produced by a supermassive black hole equal in power to a billion supernovas. The source, HDF 130, is over 10 billion light years away and existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and black holes were forming at a high rate. The X-ray ghost, so-called because a diffuse X-ray source has remained after other radiation from the outburst has died away, is in the Chandra Deep Field-North, one of the deepest X-ray images ever taken. "We'd...

HOLIYAH SOETORO SABAH, “LIA”, OBAMA’S ADOPTED SISTER What information was taken to her grave? You haven’t heard of Lia? Neither had we. The unknown, until now, adopted sister of Barack Hussein Obama died unexpectedly February 26, 1910. The USA media didn’t cover the story of this woman nor was her name found until the last few days. A competent WTPOTUS sleuth, Leza, and other researchers uncovered an article about an adopted “brother” in Indonesia, named Lia or Lee. Following up on a tidbit of information and other clues, more information was uncovered. Lia was an adopted sister, not a brother....

The apparent development of a large void of some billion light-years in diameter in the Constellation Eridanus appears to be improbable given current cosmological models. A radical and controversial theory proposes that it is a "universe-in-mass black hole" rather than hypothetical dark matter responsible for the phenomenon described as the expanding-accelerating universe. This radical theory of cosmology suggests that stars at the edge of the Hubble length universe are being consumed by a universe-in-mass black hole. In August of 2007, astronomers at the University of Minnesota located a gigantic hole in the universe. This empty space, stretching nearly a billion...

The bad news? Rather than stand up to this idiocy, Hallmark looked at its bottom line and figured a PR war with the NAACP wasn’t worth it. The card’s been yanked from the market.

An artificial "black hole" designed to capture wayward atoms has been created. It paves the way for an atom trap that could yield previously unknown states of matter. A team led by Lene Hau of Harvard University has mimicked the death spiral of matter falling into a cosmic black hole by applying a voltage across a carbon nanotube – a rolled-up sheet of carbon atoms. This created a powerful electric field that tugged at nearby rubidium atoms, which had been chilled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero: a positive charge on the surface of the nanotubes attracts...

A supermassive black hole sits inside the galaxy Centaurus A, seen in an artist's conception. Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe.In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe—from the microscopic to the supermassive—may be doorways into alternate realities.According to a mind-bending new theory, a black hole is actually a tunnel between universes—a type of wormhole. The matter the black hole attracts doesn't collapse into a single point, as has been predicted, but rather gushes out a "white hole"...

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment could be re-started on Saturday morning at the earliest, officials have said. Engineers are preparing to send a beam of sub-atomic particles all the way round the 27km-long circular tunnel which houses the LHC. The £6bn machine on the French-Swiss border is designed to shed light on fundamental questions about the cosmos. The LHC has been shut down for repairs since an accident in September 2008.

Mini-hole made of metamaterials ensnares microwave light.The artificial 'black hole' sucks up microwaves.Q. Cheng and T. J. Cui Physicists have created a black hole for light that can fit in your coat pocket. Their device, which measures just 22 centimetres across, can suck up microwave light and convert it into heat. The hole is the latest clever device to use 'metamaterials', specially engineered materials that can bend light in unusual ways. Previously, scientists have used such metamaterials to build 'invisibility carpets' and super-clear lenses. This latest black hole was made by Qiang Chen and Tie Jun Cui of Southeast University...

Researchers theorized how to design a table-top black hole earlier this year. Now two ambitious Chinese scientists have actually built one—using the same materials that made invisibility cloaks possible. The theoretical model for the black hole aped the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards. The working Chinese model consists of a cylinder, made up of strips of a special material that increasingly affects electric fields. As rays of light approach the device, they curve inward towards its center, where...

In many ways, black holes are science’s answer to science fiction. As strange as anything from a novelist’s imagination, black holes warp the fabric of spacetime and imprison light and matter in a gravitational death grip. Their bizarre properties make black holes ideal candidates for fictional villainy. But now black holes are up for a different role: heroes helping physicists assess the real-world existence of another science fiction favorite — hidden extra dimensions of space. Astrophysical giants several times the mass of the sun and midget black holes smaller than a subatomic particle could provide glimpses of an extra-dimensional existence....

One day after the Herald reported some surprised Bay State inmates - including murderers and rapists - were cashing in $250 stimulus checks, federal officials revealed the same behind-bars bonus was mailed to nearly 4,000 cons nationwide. A federal watchdog is now probing how the cons were cut the checks. The same cash also may have been sent to fugitive felons, people kicked out of the country and even individuals now deceased. It’s all part of the massive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - and what is becoming an accounting nightmare for red-faced feds. “President Obama’s $787 billion...

Astronomers have detected the deepest note ever generated in the cosmos, a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond. No human will actually hear the note, because it is 57 octaves below the keys in the middle of a piano. The detection was made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and announced at a press conference today. The note strikes an important chord with astronomers, who say it may help them understand how the universe's largest structures, called galaxy clusters, evolve. The sound waves appear to be heating gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster, some 250 million...

IT IS the ultimate cosmic villain: space and time come to an abrupt end in its presence and the laws of physics break down. Now it seems a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon.

Enlarge ImageOutlier. Astronomers think they have found an intermediate-mass black hole (bright blue object) just outside a distant galaxy. Credit: Heidi Sagerud Heavyweight and lightweight black holes abound in the universe, but nobody has detected a middleweight--and some scientists argue they don't exist. Now, astronomers say they have found the first conclusive evidence for one of these elusive objects at the fringe of a distant galaxy. Estimated to be at least 500 times more massive than the sun, the discovery could plug a large gap in the cosmic menagerie, though it leaves unanswered questions about this type of black...

"Star Trek" makes faster-than-light travel look easy, but according to new calculations by Italian physicists, a warp drive could easily create a black hole that would incinerate any passengers on a space craft and then suck Earth into a black hole. "Warp drives are so far the best case scenario to attain faster-than-light travel," said Stefano Finazzi of Italy's International School for Advanced Studies. This paper "makes it much harder to realize, if not almost impossible, warp drives." ...Other physicists agree with the Italians' calculations, up to a point. "It's a good paper; their results are sound," said Gerald Cleaver,...

PASADENA, CALIF. — The most massive black hole yet weighed lurks at the heart of the relatively nearby giant galaxy M87. The supermassive black hole is two to three times heftier than previously thought, a new model showed, weighing in at a whopping 6.4 billion times the mass of the sun. The new measure suggests that other black holes in nearby large galaxies could also be much heftier than current measurements suggest, and it could help astronomers solve a longstanding puzzle about galaxy development. "We did not expect it at all," said team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of...

Astronomers are getting a close-up look at a cosmic eating machine: a spinning black hole that devours the mass equivalent of two Earths per hour, verging on the limit of its feeding ability. Supermassive black holes can weigh as much as a billion suns or more and are thought to reside at the centers of most, if not all, large galaxies. Their gravity is so powerful it traps even light, making black holes invisible. Their presence is inferred by watching the motions of stars and gas around them, along with the radiation that's generated in their frenzied vicinities. The behemoth...

Using new data from ESA’s XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, astronomers have probed 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. The black hole at its centre was thought to be partially obscured from view by intervening clouds of gas and dust, but these current observations have revealed the innermost depths of the galaxy. “We can now start to map out the region immediately around the black hole,” says Andrew Fabian,...

A jet of gas spewing from a huge black hole has mysteriously brightened, flaring to 90 times its normal glow. For seven years the Hubble Space Telescope has been watching the jet, which pours out of the supermassive black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy. It has photographed the strange phenomenon fading and then brightening, with a peak that even outshines M87's brilliant core. Scientists have dubbed the enigmatic bright blob HST-1, and are so far at a loss to explain its weird behavior. "I did not expect the jet in M87 or any other jet powered by...

Goldman Sachs Group Inc and a parade of European banks were the major beneficiaries of $93 billion in payments from AIG -- more than half of the U.S. taxpayer money spent to rescue the massive insurer. The revelation on Sunday by American International Group Inc was another potential public relations nightmare, coming on the same weekend that the Obama administration expressed outrage over AIG's plan to pay massive bonuses to the people in the very division that destroyed the company by issuing billions of dollars in derivatives insuring risky assets. The size of the payments also illustrates how seriously a...

Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it's finally switched on this summer? Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted. Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps even more than a second, a relative...

A sharp-eyed instrument on the Very Large Telescope has given astronomers a peek at the heart of a nearby galaxy, revealing a host of young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries and a possible twin of our own Milky Way's supermassive black hole. The galaxy, dubbed NGC 253, is one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky. It is also known as the Sculptor Galaxy, because it is located in the Sculptor constellation. The Sculptor Galaxy is a starbust galaxy, so-called because of very intense star formation there. Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain...

Firms Report Massive Losses, Cite Shortcomings of Rescue Two months after the government began taking over ailing financial companies, the two largest efforts have failed to go as planned, with the firms complaining that federal officials set overly strict terms and took other unhelpful rescue measures. Fannie Mae yesterday reported a $29 billion loss for the three months ended Sept. 30 and warned that the mission it was given by the government, to help revive the mortgage market, could be compromised unless the Treasury Department takes new steps to support the company. Fannie Mae chief executive Herbert M. Allison has...

Saturday, November 8, 2008 The Black Hole Gets Bigger: AIG Back for Yet Another Bailout The Financial Times reports that AIG is up to its old tricks, back again to the trough for more money. Christmas The Iceland credit default swaps settlement is coming soon, you know. The worst is that AIG is pretending to act as if this is a negotiation as opposed to extortion. Get a load of this crap: AIG’s executives were on Friday night locked in negotiations with the authorities over a plan that could involve a debt-for-equity swap and the government’s purchase of troubled mortgage-backed...

You can manipulate a black hole as much as you like but you’ll never get rid of its event horizon, a new study suggests. This may sound a little odd, the event horizon is what makes the black hole, well… black. However, in the centre of a black hole, hidden deep inside the event horizon, is a singularity. A singularity is a mathematical consequence, it is also a point in space where the laws of physics do not apply. Mathematics also predicts that singularities can exist without an associated event horizon, but this means that we’d be able to physically...

Can A Black Hole Created By The Large Hadron Collider Fulfill Bible Prophecy? If a black hole was created by the Large Hadron Collider,could it devour one third of the earth, then be spun out of the earth into near earthy orbit, so as to block light for four hours of daylight and four hours of night, say at either dawn or dusk, and still stay in the same orbit pattern around the sun as earth? If this were possible ... wouldn't it cause a great earthquake, and unbalance the earth in its' orbit, as well as block all...

Excerpt - GENEVA, Sept 10 (Reuters) - Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) started up a huge particle-smashing machine on Wednesday, aiming to re-enact the conditions of the "Big Bang" that created the universe. Experiments in the Large Hadron Collider, a 10 billion Swiss franc ($9 billion) accelerator built underneath the Swiss-French border, could unlock the remaining secrets of particle physics and answer questions about the universe and its origins.

MIT physicist gets death threats over collider September 9, 2008 01:19 PM By Carolyn Y. Johnson Frank Wilczek, an MIT physicist and Nobel laureate, has received death threats from what he called "one disturbed individual," as the world's largest physics experiment is poised to come online tomorrow in Europe.

Scientists are today preparing to switch on the world's biggest scientific experiment. The £5billion Large Hadron Collider aims to recreate the conditions moments after the Big Bang that created the universe.

Scientists preparing to fire up the world's largest atom smasher are being flooded with phone calls and emails – even death threats – from people worried that the Large Hadron Collider, when activated, will obliterate planet Earth.

A few years ago, we described Medicaid reimbursements to dentists as niggardly, prompting a reader to fire off a note accusing us of being "against a certain section of our Waterbury population. I thought the word was supposed to have been banned." The editorial in question never mentioned Waterbury or its demographics, and niggardly, of course, has not been banned because it means miserly, stingy, ungenerously small. That people too niggardly to buy a dictionary think it's a racial epithet doesn't make it one. That exchange came to mind last week when we read about the commotion in Dallas over...

The great danger in offering unqualified praise to another person is they could turn around, do / say something really stupid, and make you doubt your original judgment. That’s why the greatest praise for public officials comes when they are safely dead. From that position, they are unlikely to offer any new, public embarrassment. Still, it’s important to climb out on a limb from time to time. There are three people whose bylines I always follow. I have never ceased to be impressed by any column I’ve read from any of these three gentlemen (in alphabetical order): Charles Krauthammer, Thomas...

A special meeting about Dallas County traffic tickets turned tense and bizarre this afternoon. County commissioners were discussing problems with the central collections office that is used to process traffic ticket payments and handle other paperwork normally done by the JP Courts. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said it seemed that central collections "has become a black hole" because paperwork reportedly has become lost in the office. Commissioner John Wiley Price, who is black, interrupted him with a loud "Excuse me!" He then corrected his colleague, saying the office has become a "white hole." That prompted Judge Thomas Jones,...

July 11, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Black-Hole SpeechThe will-to-power masquerades as tolerance. By Jonah Goldberg At a recent meeting of city officials in Dallas County, Texas, a small racial brouhaha broke out. County commissioners were hashing out difficulties with the way the central collections office handles traffic tickets. Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield found himself guilty of talking while white. He observed that the bureaucracy “has become a black hole� for lost paperwork. Fellow Commissioner John Wiley Price took great offense, shouting, “Excuse me!� That office, the black commissioner explained, has become a “white hole.� Seizing on the outrage, Judge Thomas Jones...

DALLAS — What do "black hole," "angel food cake," and "devil's food cake" have in common? They're all racist terms, says a Dallas County, Texas, official. A county commissioners' meeting this week over traffic tickets turned into a tense discussion over race when one commissioner said the county's collections office was like a certain astronomical phenomenon. "It sounds like Central Collections has become a black hole," Commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, said during the Monday meeting. One black official demanded an apology, and Commissioner John Wiley Price, who also is black, said that type of language is unacceptable. At...