Last year, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) presented the observations of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), located at the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. Their results confirm the presence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy (see Fig. 1 or this interview). Such an astrophysical object is expected to be described by the Kerr […]
A Wormhole or a Black Hole? Read More »
One thing that has always confused me since I was a bachelor: What is a power law? According to Wikipedia: “In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities (y, x), where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies
Self Similarity: the Nature of the Universe? Read More »
Tune in today (21 June 2022) at 8pm CET as host, Melanie During interviews our PhD student, Wanga Mulaudzi. In this interview, Wanga will tell us about our black hole, Sagittarius A*, and how the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration went about imaging it for the very first time in history! Watch the livestream here https://youtu.be/jWsC8HJ5d4k.
Our black hole, Sagittarius A* Read More »
Last week we received the announcement that on May 12, through press conferences around the world, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) will reveal groundbreaking results about the center of our galaxy: the Milky Way. More than a hundred years had to pass since the publication of Albert Einstein’s General Relativity, for us human beings to
What is in the Center of our Galaxy? Read More »
For translations of this post in Xhosa, Xitsonga, Afrikaans and Arabic, see here! If you have ever been lucky enough to be in a remote area, far away from the buzz of city life, then you might have looked up at the sky as the wonders of the Milky Way were revealed to you. Seeing
Beyond the Milky Way Band Read More »
La semana pasada recibimos el anuncio de que el próximo 12 de mayo, mediante conferencias de prensa en todo el mundo, el Telescopio de Horizonte de Eventos (EHT) va a revelar revolucionarios resultados sobre el centro de nuestra galaxia: La Vía Láctea. Tuvieron que pasar más de cien años desde la publicación de la Relatividad
¿Qué hay en el Centro de Nuestra Galaxia? Read More »
…that’s amore! The moon is one of the most beautiful objects in the sky to photograph. Not only is it close enough for us to resolve its craters, its apparent size is also large enough for its light to be distorted by the Earth’s atmosphere. This distortion is what causes the moon to appear to
When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie… Read More »
Many celestial objects have certain limitations on their physical properties, governed by the laws of nature. For example, if a planet gains enough mass (around 10 times as massive as Jupiter), they become massive enough to fuse deuterium or lithium, effectively categorizing them as a star. A similar case happens for stars, which are, for
How Big Can a Black Hole Become? Read More »
In this blog, I will introduce the mathematical concept of wormholes in general relativity, the possible implications in serious astrophysical research, and how this became an inspiration for the german science fiction series: Dark. With mathematics, it is possible to duplicate the geometry of spacetime, for example, we can make a copy of the Schwarzschild
Wormholes, real or science fiction? Read More »
This past month, we bid farewell to Doosoo Yoon who has been a postdoctoral fellow in our group since September 2018. His work focused on using the GRMHD code H-AMR to study the dynamics of accretion disks, winds, and jets around black holes. He is also a member of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project,
