The Washington Post has a fascinating article about the current state of research into the most unknown of all unknowns, the black hole:
It wasn’t all that long ago that black holes existed only in the realm of theory, a space- and mind-bending musing of Albert Einstein, who posited the existence of objects in the universe so dense that even light could not escape them. Even after scientists began to accept several decades ago that these extremely exotic and powerful objects were not the stuff of science fiction, they still knew virtually nothing about them.
Over the past 10 years, however, black holes have moved to the center of the world of astrophysics, leading to a steady flow of discoveries that have begun to answer, or at least better describe, some of their mysteries.
“We’re now in a golden age for black hole astrophysics,” J. Craig Wheeler of the University of Texas, who is president of the American Astronomical Society, said in a recent interview. “How they form, how they behave, their role in the formation of new galaxies. They’re all very hot topics.”
It’s not hard to see why. Recent discoveries include the likelihood that black holes, some as massive as a billion suns, exist at the center of all galaxies and may have played a key role in forming them. Researchers have also found that black holes arising from burned-out and collapsed stars generally emit bursts of super-powerful gamma rays as well as enormous jets of particles moving at 175 million mph, 26 percent of the speed of light.
And when it comes to proving, or disproving, Einstein’s theory of relativity, there is no other laboratory nearly as compelling.
There’s nothing else to say except, read the whole thing.
