– News of November 5, 2019 – In recent years, there has been significant progress in the study of black holes. The first detections of gravitational waves made possible to know how they merge, an additional proof of their existence. In April 2019, the first image of the event horizon of a black hole was…
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– News of October 29, 2019 – The expansion of the universe did not always have the same speed The universe is expanding, that is, all objects that are not held by gravity move away from each other. The speed of the expansion of the universe is however subject to debate. This is one of…
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– News of October 15, 2019 – Until recently, it was thought that the central black hole of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, was a small supermassive black hole. With 4 million solar masses, it is not one of the big supermassive black holes. Its activity seems weak, nothing to do with the overpowering…
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More details on the strong activity of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* – News of September 29, 2019 – Sagittarius A*, the central black hole of the Milky Way, is usually quite calm, at least for a black hole of several million solar masses. It has been under regular surveillance for a quarter of…
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SN2016iet, a supernova like no other – News of August 27, 2019 – The core of the stars is the place of a perpetual struggle between the radiative pressure of the thermonuclear reactions that grow outwards and the gravity that seeks to bring everything back to the center of the star. The equilibrium point is…
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For the first time, the source of a unique fast radio burst has been identified – News of July 2, 2019 – In 2007, while digging into old archives of the Parkes observatory in Australia, a student made a strange discovery. The radio telescope appeared to have recorded a very short radio burst in 2001…
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The star HR9024 loses weight due to incredible coronal mass ejections – News of June 11, 2019 – Observed from afar, the sun may seem like a shiny, smooth ball. Modern astronomy has shown that in reality the surface of our star is covered with bubbles and filaments, some of which may be absolutely gigantic.…
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Giant galaxies put the size of the Milky Way in perspective – News of May 28, 2019 – In comparison to the dwarf galaxies that surround us, the Milky Way and Andromeda may seem immense. Their diameter is indeed spread over hundreds of thousands of light-years. But if you search the whole observable universe, you…
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Italian researchers succeed in interfering with antimatter – News of May 21, 2019 – In 1923, the French physicist Louis de Broglie published a surprising article. He formulates the hypothesis that matter has an associated wave. Over the next few years, this was confirmed when researchers succeeded in interfering with electrons, protons and even whole…
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LIRGO and VIRGO detect the meeting of a neutron star and a black hole – News of May 7, 2019 – In 2015, the first gravitational wave was observed, nearly a hundred years after Albert Einstein predicted their existence. Gravitational waves are oscillations in the curvature of space-time. They occur when masses are accelerated. These…
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Wormholes would not be shortcuts, on the contrary – News of April 30, 2019 – In 1915, Albert Einstein presented his theory of general relativity, a revolutionary description of gravitation. A few weeks later, he received two letters from another German physicist Karl Schwarzschild. These letters contained the first exact solution to the equations of…
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The pulsar PSR J0002 + 6216 was ejected at an incredible speed by a supernova – News of April 2, 2019 – Supernovas and pulsars are linked because a supernova can give birth to a pulsar. When some massive stars arrive at the end of their life, their hydrostatic balance is broken. The thermonuclear reactions…
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The speed of the hypervelocity star LAMOST-HVS1 could have a surprising origin – News of March 19, 2019 – The first hypervelocity star was discovered in 2005. These objects are so fast that their speed exceeds the speed of liberation of the galaxy. They travel at velocities that exceed 500 km per second, which means…
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The observation of another planetary system could explain the orbit of a planet X – News of March 12, 2019 – FarFarOut is part of a class of objects named extreme transneptunians objects. Other objects in this category all have a very eccentric orbit. This is why some researchers believe that a massive object has…
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Big Crunch, Big RIP, Big Freeze … How will the universe end ? – News of February 10, 2019 – According to the Big RIP model, the accelerated expansion of the universe continually distances large structures and small structures until even subatomic particles are so far apart that none of the fundamental forces can act.…
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The light emitted by the blazars makes it possible to better know the universe – News of December 11, 2018 – A team of researchers has devised a method to calculate the number of photons that have been produced in the entire observable universe since its creation. When we look at the sky, we can…
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Gravitational waves could carry messages – News of November 4, 2018 – A team of Russian mathematicians has just published a study. According to this study, it should be possible to encode a message in gravitational waves. There is, however, a huge gap between theory and practice. Although it is possible to encode information in…
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Can we calculate the mass of a cluster of galaxies ? – News of October 28, 2018 – We could try to represent the mass of a cluster of galaxies with respect to the mass of the Milky Way. But the problem is that we do not really know the mass of the Milky Way.…
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