Category News in Astronomy
The wonderful discovery of the Higgs boson announced at CERN in July 2012, has represented another big leap forward for the Standard Model of particle physics that explains how elementary particles behave in the microscopic world. The Large Hadron Collider, the… Continue Reading →
The last weeks have been very exciting for neutron star astrophysics. In particular, there is news that has the potential to strongly change the way we think about neutron stars.
Update (09-Apr): It seems that the rock in the parachute hypothesis has now been accepted as the correct explanation. One of the video-makers believes so too. Here a summary from the Dutch nrc.nl (in Dutch!). Today I watched an astonishing… Continue Reading →
Two days ago the BICEP2 collaboration has made an astonishing announcement: the first direct evidence of cosmic inflation has been found.
A few days ago (Feb. 5th) I wrote a post about a special source, named XSS J12270-4859, a cryptic name behind a binary system composed of a neutron star and a normal companion star slightly less massive than our Sun.
A few weeks ago Stephen Hawking released a paper discussing the black hole information paradox that triggered an intense debate in the scientific community and had a large impact on the public. I have discussed his paper on this blog… Continue Reading →
My colleagues and I have recently studied a new peculiar binary system (XSS J12270-4859) formed by a neutron star and a low mass star that can be found in the constellation Centaurus, in the southern hemisphere. Our recent work, lead… Continue Reading →
This is a supermassive black hole spotted by Chandra that might weigh as much as 10 billion times the mass of our Sun (Link To the Chandra Website with the Original Image & Explanation)
Many of us have recently seen in the media the shocking news that Stephen Hawking has claimed that “there are no black holes”. But did Hawking really propose that black holes do not exist?
(Update: one paper is now published http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/781/1/L3/) Today I’d like to tell a brief story and discuss three recent papers accepted or submitted to The Astrophysical Journal & The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and make some self-promotion as I’ve been involved… Continue Reading →