Tag Archives: Black

Science

Black hole “billiards” may explain strange aspects of 2019 black hole merger

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Enlarge / Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around a giant black hole.

J. Samsing/Neils Bohr Institute

In 2019, the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration picked up a gravitational wave signal from a black hole merger that proved to be one for the record books. Dubbed “GW190521,” it was the most massive and most distant yet detected, and it produced the most energetic signal detected thus far, showing up in the data as more of a “bang” than the usual “chirp.”

Furthermore, the new black hole resulting from the merger was about 150 times as heavy as our Sun, making GW190521 the first direct observation of an intermediate-mass black hole. Even weirder, the two black holes that merged were locked in an elliptical (rather than circular) orbit, and their axes of spin were tipped far more than usual compared to those orbits.

Physicists love nothing more than to be presented with an intriguing puzzle that doesn’t immediately seem to fit established theory, and GW190521 gave them just that. New theoretical simulations suggest that all those bizarre aspects can be explained by the presence of a third single black hole horning in on the binary system’s final dance to produce a “chaotic tango,” according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. 

As we reported previously, on May 21, 2019, the collaboration’s detectors picked up the telltale signal of a binary black hole merger: four short wiggles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. The shorter the signal, the more massive the black holes that are merging—in this case, 85 and 66 solar masses, respectively. The black holes merged to form a new, even larger black hole of about 142 solar masses, emitting the energetic equivalent of eight solar masses in the process—hence, the powerful signal picked up by the detectors.

What made this event so unusual is that the measurement of 142 solar masses falls smack in the middle of what’s known as a “mass gap” for black holes. Most such objects fall into two groups: stellar-mass black holes (ranging from a few solar masses to tens of solar masses) and supermassive black holes, like the one in the middle of our Milky Way galaxy (ranging from hundreds of thousands to billions of solar masses). The former are the result of massive stars dying in a core-collapse supernova, while the latter’s formation process remains something of a mystery.

Enlarge / Artist’s concept of a hierarchical scheme for merging black holes. Scientists hypothesize that the two black holes were themselves the result of an earlier merger of two smaller black holes.

LIGO/Caltech/MIT/R. Hurt (IPAC)

The fact that one of the progenitor black holes weighs in at 85 solar masses is also highly unusual since this is at odds with current models of stellar evolution. The kinds of stars that would give rise to black holes between 65 and 135 solar masses would not go supernova and thus would not end up as black holes. Rather, such stars would become unstable and slough off a significant chunk of their mass. Only then would they go supernova—but the result would be a black hole of less than 65 solar masses.

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World

Russia-Ukraine war latest news: peace talks to resume; UK says Russian navy has blockaded Black Sea coast – live | World news

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The Guardian’s world affairs editor, Julian Borger, talks through the state of play between the US, China and Russia.

The United States will try to persuade China not to supply arms to Russia at a high-level meeting in Rome which the White House sees as critically important not just for the war in Ukraine but also for the future of the global balance of power.

Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, will meet his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi, in the Italian capital amid reports that Russia has asked China for weapons to bolster its faltering invasion of Ukraine.

Sullivan will point out that the US briefed Beijing on Vladimir Putin’s intentions months ahead of the invasion, but that the Chinese leadership ignored those warnings, mistakenly believing that Putin was bluffing to gain leverage, according to sources familiar with plans for the Rome meeting. Sullivan will also argue that if China supplies weapons to Moscow it will be a further, historic mistake, and a turning point in global politics.

The White House is anxious to prevent the Ukraine war further cementing a division of the world into two opposing blocs. In an interview with CNN, Sullivan said:

We also are watching closely to see the extent to which China actually does provide any form of support – material support or economic support – to Russia.

It is a concern of ours. And we have communicated to Beijing that we will not stand by and allow any country to compensate Russia for its losses from the economic sanctions.”




 Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China last month. Photograph: SPUTNIK/Reuters

Sullivan said the US had made clear to Beijing that there would “absolutely be consequences” for “large-scale” efforts to help Russia sidestep sanctions.

Russia has also asked China for economic help as it faces severe western sanctions, but Sullivan told CNN the US was “communicating directly, privately to Beijing that there will absolutely be consequences” if China helps Russia evade sanctions.

The Financial Times, New York Times and Washington Post reported on Sunday about the Russian request for weapons, amid claims from US officials that the Russian military was running short on certain kinds of armaments.

The spokesperson for the US embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, told CNN he had “never heard” of the Russian arms requests.

“The current situation in Ukraine is indeed disconcerting,” he said in a statement. “The high priority now is to prevent the tense situation from escalating or even getting out of control.”

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Science

Wormholes Could Help Solve an Infamous Black Hole Paradox, Says Fun New Paper

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What happens to information after it has passed beyond the event horizon of a black hole? There have been suggestions that the geometry of wormholes might help us solve this vexing problem – but the math has been tricky, to say the least.

 

In a new paper, an international team of physicists has found a workaround for better understanding how a collapsing black hole can avoid breaking the fundamental laws of quantum physics (more on that in a bit).

Although highly theoretical, the work suggests there are likely things we are missing in the quest to resolve general relativity with quantum mechanics.

“We discovered a new spacetime geometry with a wormhole-like structure that had been overlooked in conventional computations,” says physicist Kanato Goto of Cornell University and RIKEN in Japan.

“Entropy computed using this new geometry gives a completely different result.”

The black hole information paradox is one of the unresolved tensions between Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Under general relativity, the event horizon of a black hole is a point of no return. Everything that passes beyond that critical point is inexorably slurped into the black hole’s gravity well, and no speed in the Universe, not even that of light in a vacuum, is sufficient for escape velocity. It’s gone, that’s it. Kaput. Irretrievable.

 

Then along came Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, suggesting that, when quantum mechanics is taken under consideration, black holes could emit radiation after all.

This, according to theory, occurs as a result of the black hole’s interference with surrounding particles’ wave-like properties, effectively making it ‘glow’ with a temperature that gets hotter as the black hole gets smaller.

Eventually, this glow should make a black hole shrink to nothing.

“This is called black hole evaporation because the black hole shrinks, just like an evaporating water droplet,” Goto explains.

Since the ‘glow’ doesn’t look like what went into the black hole in the first place, it would appear that whatever entered into the evaporated black hole is gone for good. But according to quantum mechanics, information cannot simply vanish from the Universe. Many physicists have explored the possibility that somehow, that information is encoded in Hawking radiation.

Goto and his team wanted to mathematically explore this idea by computing the entropy of Hawking radiation around a black hole. That’s the measure of disorder in a system, and can be used to diagnose information loss in Hawking radiation.

 

According to a 1993 paper by physicist Don Page, if disorder reverses and entropy drops down to zero as a black hole vanishes, the paradox of the missing information should be avoided. Unfortunately, there’s nothing in quantum mechanics that would allow this reversal to happen.

Enter the wormhole, or at least a mathematical replica of one under very specific models of the Universe. This is a connection between two regions of a curved sheet of spacetime, a bit like a bridge across a ravine.

Thinking of it this way in conjunction with black holes gives us a different means of calculating the entropy of Hawking radiation, Goto says.

“A wormhole connects the interior of the black hole and the radiation outside, like a bridge,” he explains.

When the team performed their calculations using the wormhole model, their results matched the Page entropy curve. This suggests that information hoovered beyond the event horizon of a black hole might not be lost forever after all.

But there are, of course, still some questions that remain. Until these are answered, we can’t consider the black hole information paradox definitively resolved.

“We still don’t know the basic mechanism of how information is carried away by the radiation,” Goto says. “We need a theory of quantum gravity.”

The research has been published in the Journal of High Energy Physics.

 

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Science

New discovery says the closest black hole to Earth isn’t a black hole at all

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The Earth’s closest black hole isn’t a black hole at all. Instead, astronomers say it’s just a two-star system where one star is sucking the life out of the other.

Earth’s closest black hole isn’t a black hole after all

Back in 2020, a mission led by the European Southern Observatory reported the discovery of a black hole close to Earth. In fact, it was located just a little over 1000 light-years away. This made it the closest black hole to our home planet that we’d ever discovered. Now, though, after reanalyzing the data, astronomers say the system they discovered, HR6819, doesn’t actually have a black hole at all.

When it was first discovered, astronomers believed that HR6819 was a three-star system. They also believed that two of the stars orbited a black hole. However, a study led by Julia Bodensteiner, a then Ph.D. student at KU Leuven in Belgium, looked at an alternative option.

Bodensteiner said that HR6819 could be a two-star system with no black hole at all. This option meant one of the stars in the system had to have been stripped in the past. Essentially, one star would have lost a lot of its mass to the other, causing the effect that astronomers had observed. This alternative still left quite a mystery for astronomers to solve, though.

Digging deeper into the research

Image source: zhengzaishanchu / Adobe

Around the same time Bodensteiner’s study took place, another group of researchers was also looking into the discovery. They, too, found that the system was more likely a two-star system with one star siphoning mass from the other. A third study also determined that Earth’s closest black hole wasn’t really a black hole, too.

In that third study, astronomers Kareem El-Badry and Eliot Quataert of UC Berkeley analyzed the system’s spectra. They found that the mass of one of the stars was greater than the mass of the other. As such, they said the one star is more bloated and appeared to be recently stripped and contracting into a hot subdwarf.

Bodensteiner’s team joined up with another team led by KU Leaven researcher Abigail Frost to study the discovery more in-depth. Two years after its discovery, the team says the Earth’s closest black hole is in fact just a two-star system where one star siphoned resources from another.

“Our best interpretation so far is that we caught this binary system in a moment shortly after one of the stars had sucked the atmosphere off its companion star,” Bodensteiner wrote in a statement featured on the ESO’s website. She also says that the occurrence is actually very common in close binary systems. Because one star siphoned material from the other, the recipient began to spin more rapidly.

It was this more rapid spinning that helped create the illusion that gave birth to Earth’s closest black hole. A vampire star is still pretty scary, but, at least we can rest easy knowing there isn’t a black hole less than 1500 light-years away from us.



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Entertainment

‘Black Panther’ Director Ryan Coogler Mistaken for Bank Robber

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Bank of America has apologized to the director Ryan Coogler after he was assumed to be a bank robber and briefly handcuffed by the police while trying to withdraw money from a branch in Atlanta in January.

Mr. Coogler, best known for directing “Black Panther,” had handed a teller a withdrawal slip on Jan. 7, asking for more than $10,000, with a note on the back asking her to “be discreet when handing him the cash,” according to a police report.

Mr. Coogler also had his California state ID card as well as his Bank of America card when he approached the teller. Both Mr. Coogler and the teller are Black.

The teller “received an alert notification” from Mr. Coogler’s account and quickly advised her manager that he was trying to rob the bank branch in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, the report states.

The police were called and when they arrived they found an S.U.V. parked in front of the bank.

The driver identified Mr. Coogler as a movie producer and said he was waiting for Mr. Coogler while he was making a transaction inside the bank. A woman who was a passenger in the S.U.V. gave the same information.

The officers were given a description of Mr. Coogler that matched the description of the man who was reported to have been trying to rob the bank, the police said.

The officers said they detained the driver and passenger and placed them in a patrol car. They then removed Mr. Coogler from the bank in handcuffs and determined that he was not a bank robber, according to the police report.

The police confirmed that the episode resulted from a “mistake by Bank of America and that Mr. Coogler was never in the wrong,” according to the report, which adds that Mr. Coogler was immediately taken out of handcuffs and that the two others were taken out of the patrol car.

All three were “given an explanation of the incident as well as an apology for the mistake by the Bank of America,” the report states.

In body camera video released by the police, Mr. Coogler was shown sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car.

He explained that he had been withdrawing money to pay a medical assistant who works for his family. He said that he had passed a note asking for a discreet withdrawal because he doesn’t feel safe when he withdraws cash to pay her and has to wait as the bills are passed through a counting machine.

“I’m trying to get money out of my own account,” he told the police in the video. The teller “never said it was a problem,” Mr. Coogler said, adding that he had used his bank card and PIN and had given her his ID.

Mr. Coogler, who was wearing a cap, sunglasses and a mask, said that he was waiting for her to bring his money when he heard the sound of guns being taken out from their holsters as the police arrived.

“She got scared when a Black dude handed her a note,” Mr. Coogler said. “I don’t know what else to say.” He added, “If she was scared, she’s got to admit that.”

In a separate video released by the police, the teller told investigators that Mr. Coogler kept pointing to the note and, even though he handed her his ID, her “stomach started turning.” On her computer, the withdrawal was flagged as a “high-risk transaction,” she said. She said she told her manager, “I don’t feel comfortable about this transaction.”

The manager suggested they talk to the customer, but she was worried he might have a gun, she said, and so she called 911. She added that, as a pregnant woman: “I have to protect myself. I have to protect my child.”

In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Coogler said, “This situation should never have happened.”

He added that Bank of America “worked with me and addressed it to my satisfaction and we have moved on.”

Bank of America said in a statement: “We deeply regret that this incident occurred. It never should have happened, and we have apologized to Mr. Coogler.”

In addition to directing “Black Panther” (2018), Mr. Coogler also directed the “Rocky” spinoff “Creed” (2015) and “Fruitvale Station” (2013), which is about the fatal shooting of a Black man, Oscar Grant III, by a white police officer on a subway platform in Oakland, Calif., in 2009.

In 2019, “Black Panther” became the first Marvel film to secure an Oscar nomination for best picture. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won in three categories, including best original score and best costume design.

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Entertainment

‘Black Panther’ director mistaken for robber, handcuffed at Atlanta bank – WSB-TV Channel 2

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ATLANTA — Black Panther director Ryan Coogler was mistaken for a bank robber at a metro Atlanta Bank of America and detained, police reports show.

The incident unfolded on Jan. 7, 2022 at the Bank of America at 1280 West Paces Ferry Road, when police responded to reports of a man trying to rob the bank.

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According to an Atlanta Police Department report, a Bank of America employee called police after Coogler passed him a filled-out withdrawal slip with a note written on the back asking tellers to be discreet with the transaction.

When officers arrived on scene, Coogler was still inside the bank. Officers brought him outside and handcuffed him as they investigated.

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Officers determined that Coogler was attempting to withdraw a cash amount valued over $10,000 dollars. The bank teller received a notification from Coogler’s account and told her manager that he was trying to rob the bank.

Officers determined that the incident was a mistake by Bank of America and Coogler was released. Two people who Coogler was with were also detained and released, but never handcuffed.

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Bank of America apologized to Coogler and he was allowed to go on his way.

Bank of America issued a statement confirming the incident, writing:

“We deeply regret that this incident occurred. It never should have happened and we have apologized to Mr. Coogler”

Channel 2 Action News received a statement from Coogler’s public relations team:

“This situation should never have happened. However, Bank of America worked with me and addressed it to my satisfaction and we have moved on,” said Coogler.

Coogler directed the original Black Panther, which was the highest-grossing film of all time by a Black director. He has been in Atlanta directing the Black Panther sequel, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”

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Science

Black Hole Billiards in the Centers of Galaxies

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Illustration of a swarm of smaller black holes in a gas disk rotating around a giant black hole. Credit: J. Samsing/Niels Bohr Institute

Researchers provide the first plausible explanation to why one of the most massive (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

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Entertainment

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler mistaken for bank robber

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Black Panther director Ryan Coogler was mistaken for bank robber and ARRESTED after a passing note to pregnant Bank of America cashier asking them to withdraw $12,000 from his account and count it ‘discreetly’

  • Coogler walked into the Bank of America branch in Atlanta in January 
  • He passed a note to the pregnant cashier asking for $12,000 in cash 
  • He wrote: ‘Please do the money count somewhere else. I’d like to be discreet’ 
  • The bank teller mistook the incident for an attempted robbery and alerted police
  • Cops arrived and detained two people waiting for Coogler in an SUV outside
  • They then went inside and put the 35-year-old director in handcuffs 
  • They let him go once they realized the incident was a misunderstanding 
  • It remains unclear why Coogler needed $12,000 in cash  

By Jennifer Smith, Chief Reporter For Dailymail.Com

Published: | Updated:










Black Panther director Ryan Coogler was mistaken for a bank robber and briefly arrested in January after walking into a Bank of America in Atlanta wearing sunglasses, a hat and a mask and asking the cashier to ‘discreetly’ withdraw $12,000 from his account. 

The incident occurred sometime in January but was revealed by TMZ on Wednesday morning. Coogler, 35, walked into the bank wearing a green hoodie, black beanie and sunglasses.  

He passed the cashier a note which read: ‘I would like to withdraw $12,000 CASH from my checking account. 

It remains unclear why he needed the money, or why two others had driven him there in an SUV to retrieve it. 

‘Please do the money count somewhere else. I’d like to be discreet.’ 

Black Panther director Ryan Coogler was mistaken for a bank robber and briefly arrested in January after walking into a Bank of America in Atlanta wearing sunglasses, a hat and a mask and asking the cashier to ‘discreetly’ withdraw $12,000 from his account

The note spooked the cashier, who was described in the police report as a ‘pregnant black woman’. 

She called police claiming Coogler was a bank robber. 

Police arrived and detained two people who were waiting for him in an SUV parked outside. 

TMZ reports that they then went inside the bank and placed Coogler in handcuffs too. 

Once they realized it was a misunderstanding, they let him go. 

Coogler was furious about the mistake and demanded the badge numbers of the cops involved, according to the report. 

The movie director has been in Atlanta for the last several months filming the sequel to Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. 

He lives in California. Coogler told Variety this morning: ‘This situation should never have happened. 

‘However, Bank of America worked with me and addressed it to my satisfaction and we have moved on.’  

The production has been besieged by cast injuries and vaccine rows. 

Letitia Wright, who will reprise her role as Shuri, was severely injured while filming in August last year in Boston. 

It is unclear what exactly happened, but the actress suffered a concussion and fractured shoulder while performing a stunt on-set. 

In a note to the cast and crew in November last year, Kevin Feige, Louis D’Esposito and Nate Moore of Marvel Studios called it a ‘frightening’ accident. 

The sequel is due to be released on November 11, 2022. It will no doubt be a box office hit, following on from the record-breaking success of the first movie.  

Fans are eager to see how the story will playout in the absence of Chadwick Boseman, the franchise’s beloved central star who died from cancer in August 2020.

The incident occurred in January at a Bank of America in Atlanta (file image)



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Science

Gigantic Bubbles at Center of Milky Way Caused by Powerful Jet of Energy From Supermassive Black Hole

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The NASA visualization team created a superposition of an image of the Milky Way, taken by the European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, and a visualization of the simulations of the eRosita and Fermi bubbles prepared by Karen Yang (lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan) in cooperation with the co-authors of the paper Mateusz Ruszkowski (University of Michigan) and Ellen Zweibel (University of Wisconsin). Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

In 2020, the X-ray telescope eRosita took images of two enormous bubbles extending far above and below the center of our galaxy.

Since then, astronomers have debated their origin. Now, a study including University of Michigan research suggests the bubbles are a result of a powerful jet of activity from the supermassive (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.6"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));

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Entertainment

‘Black Panther’ Director Ryan Coogler wrongly targeted as bank robber

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Bank staffers mistakenly thought Ryan Coogler was staging a robbery, so they called cops, and the famed director actually ended up in handcuffs, briefly.

According to an Atlanta PD report, obtained by TMZ, Coogler was detained after stopping in a Bank of America to make a transaction back in January – a completely legal transaction but that’s not how one teller took it.

Coogler walked in rocking shades and a COVID face mask – not uncommon, of course – but he handed the teller a withdrawal slip that had a note written on the back.

We’re told his message read, “I would like to withdraw $12,000 cash from my checking account. Please do the money count somewhere else. I’d like to be discreet.” Understandable, considering the amount of money he was getting but this led to the teller thinking something suspicious was going down, and cops were called for an attempted robbery.

When officers arrived, they detained 2 people waiting outside for Ryan in an SUV and then went in and brought the director himself out in handcuffs.

After an investigation, the police say this was all just a huge mistake and the fault lies with the BoA employee, who’s described in the report as a pregnant Black woman.

According to the report, when the teller went to make the transaction on her computer, it triggered some sort of an alert. So, she told her boss Coogler was attempting to rob the bank, and they called 911.

In the end, cops realized this was a screw-up, and Ryan had actually done nothing wrong. Sounds like Ryan wasn’t too pleased. The report notes he asked for badge numbers of all the responding officers once everyone was released.

He’s been in GA a lot over the past year, filming the sequel to “Black Panther,” which itself has been a drama-filled process with cast injuries and alleged COVID conspiracy talk. And now…this.

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