Black holes

15 articles

- Astronomy
The Black Sheep of Black Holes
- By Subodh Patil
- July 1, 2020
This potential member of the cosmic zoo may explain a lot about how the cosmos is structured.
- Physics
Think You Know the Definition of a Black Hole? Think Again
- By Brian Gallagher
- July 11, 2019
When I was 12, I made the mistake of watching the Paul W. S. Anderson horror film, Event Horizon. It gave me nightmares for weeks: The movie’s title refers to an experimental spaceship that could create artificial black holes through which to travel, making interstellar trips trivial. But the crew, upon activating the ship’s gravity […]
- Physics
How Supermassive Black Holes Were Discovered
- By Mark J. Reid
- February 6, 2019
Astronomers turned a fantastic concept into reality.
- Physics
The Strangeness of Black Holes
- By Enrico Brehm
- January 16, 2019
From quantum information to the Schwarzschild radius.
- Physics
Black Hole Firewalls Could Be Too Tepid to Burn
- By Charlie Wood
- August 28, 2018
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Despite its ability to bend both minds and space, an Einsteinian black hole looks so simple a child could draw it. There’s a point in the center, a perfectly spherical boundary a bit farther out, and that’s […]

Announcing a Black Hole Essay Competition from Harvard

The $10,000 First Prize will include the opportunity to publish the winning article in Nautilus, a leading online and print magazine that blends science, culture, and philosophy. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . The Black Hole Initiative (BHI) at Harvard University announces the first-ever Black Hole Essay Competition, inviting […]
- By The Black Hole Initiative
- July 31, 2018
Why It’s Hard to Recognize a Black Hole

Despite having a standard model of an AGN—a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk with jets streaming out in opposite directions, all encompassed by a dusty torus—making sense of our observations is still a challenge.NASA/CXC/CfA/R.Kraft et al.; MPIfR/ESO/APEX/A.Weiss et al.; ESO/WFI. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . […]
- By Summer Ash
- July 10, 2018
Are Gravitational Wave Detections Becoming Normal?

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . When I heard the news, I emailed my editor with my immediate reaction: “Bummer.” For the fourth time now, humans have directly detected the collision of two black holes. The violent merger occurred over 2 billion years ago, between black holes with […]
- By Dan Garisto
- September 27, 2017
What to Savor about the Discovery of Gravity Waves

What will come with the ability to detect gravitational waves? Nergis Mavalvala can’t wait to find out.Image by LLacertae / Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . You may have once startled a duck or two after tossing a rock into a pond to watch the water ripple. But […]
- By Silvia Golumbeanu
- September 25, 2017
Dark Matter May Be Trapped in All the Black Holes

When, on February the 11th, 2016, the spokesperson for the Advanced Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observer, or aLIGO, for short, announced the discovery of gravitational waves, I was stunned. For sure, we expected aLIGO to, at some point, give us something interesting, but we thought it would be tentative. We expected that the project would, […]
- By Pedro Ferreira
- August 7, 2017
Why It’s Hard for Black Holes to Get Together

The universe’s greatest sinkholes have no trouble swallowing anything—except themselves.
- By Kate Becker
- January 28, 2016

- Physics
Why “Hawking Radiation” Was Almost “Feynman Radiation”
- By Michael Segal
- September 2, 2014
Nautilus’ Ingenious this month, Alan Lightman, is a successful writer and physicist, and one of the very rare people to receive an appointment in both science and humanities at MIT*. He did his doctoral research at Caltech while Richard Feynman was a professor there. One day, Lightman was on hand to see the brilliant and […]
- General
“White Holes” Could Exist—But That Doesn’t Mean They Do
- By Matthew Francis
- May 2, 2014
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . A black hole is a one-way door to oblivion. According to general relativity, once anything crosses its boundary—the event horizon—it cannot return to the outside. For that particle, the black hole is the entire future.We’ll never actually get a chance to see […]
- Arts
The Ends of Time, in Art and Science
- By Rose Eveleth
- February 3, 2014
In Gallery 919, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a giant breathing machine. Its creator, William Kentridge, calls it “the elephant,” after Charles Dickens’s description of factory machines that move “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” On the walls surrounding the elephant […]
- Physics
Infinite Garbage Can
- By Ron Cowen
- November 11, 2013
Can information ever be rescued from inside a black hole?