Each time we've looked at the Universe in a fundamentally new way, we didn't just see more of what we already knew what was out there. In addition, those novel capabilities allowed the Universe to surprise us, breaking records, revolutionizing our view of what was out there, and teaching us information that we never could have learned without collecting that key data.
German astrophysicist Reinhard Genzel, 73, takes the stage. He then begins his lecture in the most unexpected way: What's the point of talking about black holes if all the Hollywood producers already know what they are? Going into them is easy, but once you do ooooh. The audience made up of a couple of hundred professors and students from 20 countries is taken aback.
As a science communicator, I don't think a week goes by without a press release hitting my inbox informing me of astronomers finding some new record-breaking object. Sometimes it's the smallest planet yet discovered or the most iron-deficient star. But a very common claim is a distance record: the farthest galaxy from Earth ever seen, for example. When it comes to these sorts of record breakers, I have complicated feelings, built over decades of writing about them.
They can directly collapse to a black hole, they can become core-collapse supernovae, they can be torn apart by tidal cataclysms, they can be subsumed by other, larger stars, or they can die gently, as our Sun will, by blowing off their outer layers in a planetary nebula while their cores contract down to form a degenerate white dwarf. All of the forms of stellar death help enrich the Universe, adding new atoms, isotopes, and even molecules to the interstellar medium:
It's often said that the great arc of science always bends toward the truth, but sometimes it takes an awfully long time to get there. Around 500 years ago, there was really only one scientific phenomenon that was, without controversy, extremely well-understood: the motion of the celestial objects in the sky. The Sun rose in the east and set in the west with a regular, 24 hour period.
It sounds like something from the latest science fiction blockbuster. But scientists in Massachusetts have revealed the terrifyingly high odds a black hole will explode in the next 10 years. In a new paper, they say there's a 90 per cent chance of at least one black hole exploding by 2035. If and when it happens, telescopes positioned in space and here on Earth should be able to capture the event - which fortunately won't be dangerous for Earthlings.