Best printers for Home

Best Mixer Grinder

Best wired Earphones

Best 43 Inch TV in India

Best Wi Fi Routers

Best Home Theatre in India

Smart Watch under 5000

Best Laptops for Education

Best Laptop for Students

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists found that the black hole at the center of our galaxy is spinning so fast its dragging space-time along. </li><li>Don't worry. The distortion won't affect us.</li></ul>A team of scientists has discovered that the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is spinning so fast that it's squishing space-time.Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory telescope, a team of physicists calculated the speed at which the supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is spinning, publishing their findings last month in <a target="_blank" href="https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/1/428/7326786?login=false#423149164">the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society</a>.They found that Sagittarius A* — located 26,000 light-years away from Earth, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/supermassive-black-hole-sagittarius/">according to NASA</a> — is spinning so fast that it's actually dragging surrounding space-time along with it, squishing it down like a football, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/28/world/sagittarius-a-black-hole-spin-space-time-scn/index.html">CNN reported</a>."With this spin, Sagittarius A* will be dramatically altering the shape of space-time in its vicinity," Ruth Daly, the lead author on the study, told CNN. "We're used to thinking and living in a world where all the spatial dimensions are equivalent — the distance to the ceiling and the distance to the wall and the distance to the floor … they all sort of are linear, it's not like one is totally squished up compared to the others.""But if you have a rapidly rotating black hole, the space-time around it is not symmetric," Daly said, according to CNN. "The spinning black hole is dragging all of the space-time around with it … it squishes down the space-time, and it sort of looks like a football."That may sound alarming, but don't worry; the black hole is way too far away to affect us here on Earth.But, Daly said, understanding how black holes function can help scientists learn more about the formation and evolution of galaxies like our own.

The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is spinning so fast, it's squishing space-time down like a football

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A star positioned near the center of the Milky Way seems to have come from outside of our galaxy. </li><li>The interloper is thought to have traveled from a galaxy that has since disappeared. </li></ul>Scientists have spotted a star near the center of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/young-stars-appear-milky-way-edge-galaxy-collision-2020-1">Milky Way</a> that shouldn't be there.A study published Monday suggests SO-6, a star located about 0.04 light-years from the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-black-hole-spinning-fast-squishing-space-time-2023-11">black hole at the center of our galaxy</a>, could be an extragalactic star that traveled more than 50,000 light years to reach our galaxy's heart.This is the first study to show that a star from outside our galaxy could end up in the middle of it.The findings could help explain a long-standing galactic mystery: where do stars near the black hole come from? <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/milky-way-galaxy-black-hole-lights-up-suddenly-2019-8">Sagittarius A*</a>, the black hole inside our galaxy, is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-webb-space-telescope-spots-most-distant-supermassive-black-hole-2023-7">supermassive</a> so its gravity is too intense for stars to be born in that area.<div type="image" title="milky way galaxy with zoomed in section on black hole" height="1041" width="1041" msid="105845077" hostid="261" sizebytes="51246"></div>To identify its origins, a team of scientists led by Shogo Nishiyama at Miyagi University of Education in Japan, studied the stars's composition using the Subaru Telescope, a 26-foot-wide observatory in Hawaii.They found the star was made of chemicals more often seen in <a target="_blank" href="https://subarutelescope.org/en/results/2023/12/03/3319.html">smaller galaxies that float outside the Milky Way,</a> like the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy.The most likely theory is that SO-6 was born in a small galaxy that once orbited the Milky Way but has since disintegrated.The orphaned star, which is at least 10 billion years old, would have then been grabbed by the Milky Way's gravitational pull. It traveled at least 50,000 light years to reach Sagittarius A*, though it may have gone even farther than that as it's more likely to have gone in a spiral rather than a straight line.Scientists will now work to confirm the origin of SO-6, as well as determine if it traveled alone or with companions, lead scientist Nishiyama said."With further investigation, we hope to unravel the mysteries of stars near the supermassive black hole," he added.

A mysterious star from outside the Milky Way has somehow ended up near our galaxy's supermassive black hole

<ul class="summary-list"><li>An international team unveiled the first-ever image of the <keyword id="12323604" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="milky-way" source="Orion">Milky Way</keyword>'s <keyword id="13903417" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-hole" source="Orion">black hole</keyword> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-scientists-big-reveal-maybe-photo-milky-way-black-hole-2022-5">on Thursday</a>.</li><li>Researchers say the image helps confirm predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity.</li></ul>A global research team with the <keyword id="13903419" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="event-horizon-telescope" source="Orion">Event Horizon Telescope</keyword> has captured the light around our own <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5">supermassive black hole</a>, Sagittarius A*, revealing its first-ever image. The new postcard from the center of our Milky Way galaxy helps confirm predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity."We were stunned by how well the ring size agreed with predictions from Einstein's theory of general relativity," Geoffrey Bower, an EHT collaborator and astronomer at Academia Sinica, in Taipei, <a href="https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/1803859399">said in a statement</a>. "These unprecedented observations have greatly improved our understanding of what happens at the very center of our galaxy and offer new insights on how these giant black holes interact with their surroundings."<div type="image" title="Albert Einstein manuscript theory of relativity, Christie's Paris" height="3712" width="4949" msid="91526913" hostid="261"></div>A century ago, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-warps-space-astronomers-see-light-behind-it-2021-8">black holes</a> — points in <keyword id="11895441" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="space" source="Orion">space</keyword> where gravity is so strong that neither particles nor light can escape from them. Over the last hundred years, scientists have repeatedly put Einstein's theory of general relativity to the test, trying to find situations or circumstances in which it comes up short. They have not yet found one.The event horizon of a black hole allows researchers to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-black-hole-animation-gravity-distorts-vision-2019-9">witness gravity at its most extreme</a>, thus seeing if Einstein's theory of general relativity holds up. Einstein's theories about how matter behaves around black holes have consistently passed cosmic tests, and Thursday's headshots of Sagittarius A* are no exception: Einstein even predicted the symmetrical shape that scientists photographed."Taking a picture of the black hole at the center of our galaxy is an incredible achievement. It shows that Einstein was right, once again," Duncan Brown, a physics professor at Syracuse University, who was not involved in the cosmic photo op, said in a press release. "The image shows hot gas swirling around the black hole at the heart of our galaxy. The gas is moving almost as fast as the speed of light," Brown added. <div type="image" title="first image of a black hole m87" height="1515" width="2020" msid="91526914" hostid="261"></div>The new image isn't the first time researchers were able to take an image of a supermassive black hole. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-snaps-first-image-messier-87-2019-4">first image of a black hole</a>, called M87*, at the center of the more distant Messier 87 galaxy. The images of the two black holes look similar, even though the Milky Way's black hole is 1,000 times smaller.As more black holes get their headshots taken, researchers can continue probing Einstein's theories for cracks.

Black hole image supports Einstein's theory of gravity, disappointing scientists who are probing for cracks

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A new image <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-scientists-big-reveal-maybe-photo-milky-way-black-hole-2022-5">reveals</a> the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-black-hole-magnetic-field-event-horizon-telescope-2021-3">supermassive black hole</a> at the center of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vanishing-radio-signals-mystery-objects-in-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-1">Milky Way</a> for the first time.</li><li>In 2019, the <keyword id="13903419" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="event-horizon-telescope" source="Orion">Event Horizon Telescope</keyword> captured the first-ever image of a supermassive <keyword id="13903417" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-hole" source="Orion">black hole</keyword>.</li></ul>For the first time, take a good look at the supermassive black hole churning at the center of our galaxy.Hundreds of scientists worked together to capture the first-ever image of the Milky Way's central black hole, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "A-star"). Research institutions across the planet unveiled the picture in simultaneous press conferences on Thursday.In the photo, a brilliant fuzzy ring of orange and yellow glows around a dark center — the accretion disk, a swirl of superheated material, circling the event horizon, where not even light can escape the black hole's gravity. That disk allows scientists to capture the black hole's silhouette, since the object swallows all forms of light, making it impossible to photograph directly.Researchers took this stunning photo through the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an international collaboration that involves 300 international scientists and eight radio observatories around the world. Xavier Barcons, director general of the European Southern Observatory, said at a press conference that the groundbreaking result is a timely reminder of what we can achieve when countries work together.Sara Issaoun of Harvard, an EHT collaborator, said that researchers gathered direct evidence that Sagittarius A* is a black hole, with a size of about 52 microarcseconds in the sky."This appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the Moon," she said at a press conference.In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole located 53.5 million light-years away. That picture showed a supermassive black hole at the center of another galaxy called Messier 87, or M87, more than 50 million light-years away. To achieve the photographic feat, the researchers linked telescopes across the planet to focus on the same object all together, creating a virtual observatory the size of Earth.<div type="image" title="first image of a black hole m87" height="1515" width="2020" msid="91521146" hostid="261"></div>For many EHT scientists, the next step was obvious: turn this groundbreaking cosmic lens to the heart of the Milky Way."We were all amazed that the image of Sagittarius A* looked so similar to the image of the black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy," Sera Markoff, co-chair of the EHT <keyword id="11896083" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="science" source="Orion">Science</keyword> Council and astrophysicist at the University of Amsterdam, told reporters on Thursday. "This tells us that general relativity governs these objects up close, and any differences we see further away must be due to differences in the material that surrounds the black holes," Markoff said.Scientists think every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center, from the very early days of the galaxy's birth. A major astronomical mystery is how black holes and their <keyword id="12393175" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="galaxies" source="Orion">galaxies</keyword> evolve together."Understanding black holes, at any level, addresses fundamental mysteries of the universe. If we're ever going to learn something that is completely unknown to us, it will be from doing something like studying black holes," Shep Doeleman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and founding director of the EHT collaboration, told Insider ahead of Thursday's announcement."It's a wonderful time to be alive," he added.<h2>'Seeing is believing'</h2>Previous Nobel Prize-winning research has demonstrated that the supermassive compact object at the center of the Milky Way must be a black hole, based on the way that its gravity affects nearby stars. Doeleman compared that research to finding bones with teeth marks on the jungle floor and concluding there is a large predator in the area."Contrast that with taking a camera out and taking a snapshot of a lion," he said, adding, "Seeing is believing, in a certain sense."Sagittarius A* possesses the mass of 4 million suns, creating one of the most powerful gravitational forces in the universe, devouring the matter that falls into its event horizon. There's nothing to fear, though. It's about 27,000 light-years from Earth.<div type="image" title="Sagittarius A" height="565" width="754" msid="91521148" hostid="261"></div>Even though it's closer to us, this black hole was much more difficult to image than M87. It's 1,000 times less massive than M87, which means the accretion disk orbits multiple times in just a few hours."During one night of observing, it's constantly shapeshifting. So it's very difficult to combine all the observations from a single night and to make a still image. It's like having somebody move around while you're keeping the shutter open on your camera. Everything gets very blurry," Doeleman said.Though it's hard to capture, that speed makes Sagittarius A* ideal for studying the dynamics of black holes and how they evolve over time. It could take months of observing M87 to see the flares and feeding activities that occur on Sagittarius A* in just one week.The new image of the behemoth at the center of our galaxy could hint at even more exciting discoveries to come.<h2>Working toward video of the Milky Way's black hole</h2>These images are opening a new field of black-hole studies, and it doesn't stop with still pictures. EHT has branched out into a second project, called next-generation EHT (ngEHT), to make the first videos of black holes.The group is working to add more telescopes to its network and leverage new computer technology to process 10 times more data from those telescopes, Doeleman <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">told Insider in 2019</a>. In doing so, he said, they could capture video of both Sagittarius A* and their original photo subject, M87, in about five years.Now, two years in, EHT has 11 telescopes in its network, from Chile to Greenland to France to the South Pole. Doeleman said this week that the collaboration still has to double its telescope fleet. He hopes that eventually, videos can reveal what a still image cannot: how those black holes devour matter, how they launch X-ray jets from their poles, and how matter orbits around them."We want to see it move and live and breathe. So we want to capture the dynamics of black holes in motion," Doeleman said.The first videos will probably be jerky and low-resolution, but EHT plans to keep imaging black holes in more and more detail.Correction: May 12, 2022 — An earlier version of this story stated that Sagittarius A* is about 52 arcseconds in the sky. The story has been updated to reflect the correct size of the black hole, which is 52 microarcseconds.

Meet the black hole at the center of our galaxy: Scientists just took its picture for the first time

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists may reveal the first-ever <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-black-hole-magnetic-field-event-horizon-telescope-2021-3">picture</a> of the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-animation-supermassive-black-holes-orbiting-2021-4">black hole</a> at the center of our galaxy on Thursday.</li><li>The National <keyword id="11896083" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="100" keywordseo="science" source="Orion">Science</keyword> Foundation billed the announcement as a "groundbreaking <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vanishing-radio-signals-mystery-objects-in-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-1">Milky Way</a> discovery."</li></ul>The scientists who revealed the first image of a <keyword id="13903417" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-hole" source="Orion">black hole</keyword>, in 2019, have a major new announcement to make on Thursday.They won't say what they've discovered. But after the snapshot of the first black hole, which was located in another galaxy, the collaboration began working toward capturing imagery of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It's possible that they'll reveal the first-ever picture of our galaxy's black hole, which is called Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) and possesses the mass of 4 million suns.In a press release, the National Science Foundation teased a "groundbreaking Milky Way discovery" by the black-hole-hunting collaboration, which is called the <keyword id="13903419" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="event-horizon-telescope" source="Orion">Event Horizon Telescope</keyword> (EHT). At least seven research institutions across the planet will hold simultaneous press conferences to announce the discovery on Thursday at 9 a.m. ET.Watch the announcement live, in the video embedded below.Sagittarius A* has never been captured in detail. At best, NASA's Chandra telescope orbiting Earth has spotted the bright X-rays flaring around the black hole.For any individual telescope, getting a clear close-up image of a black hole is impossible. To capture their first image in 2019, the EHT researchers solved this problem by linking telescopes across the planet to focus on the same object all together, creating a virtual observatory the size of Earth.<div type="image" title="Sagittarius A" height="565" width="754" msid="91503810" hostid="261"></div>Shep Doeleman, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and founding director of the EHT collaboration, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">told Insider in 2019</a> that the group was focusing its attention on Sagittarius A*, as well as branching into a separate project, called next-generation EHT, to create the first video footage of a black hole.The group would need to add more telescopes to its network and leverage new computer technology to process 10 times more data from those telescopes, Doeleman said at the time. In doing so, he estimated that they could capture video of both Sagittarius A* and their original photo subject, M87, in about five years.Now it's more than two years later — too early for video, according to Doeleman's 2019 predictions, but potentially early enough for a clear image.A representative for EHT declined to share further details ahead of Thursday's announcement.<h2>Videos would shed new light on how black holes eat</h2>Eventually, videos could reveal what a still image cannot: how black holes devour matter."We can see the black hole evolve in real time," Doeleman said in 2019. "Then we can understand how it launches these jets that come from its north and south poles. We can see how it evolves with the galaxy. We can even test Einstein's gravity in completely different ways, by looking at the orbits of matter — not light, but matter — around the black hole."The first videos will probably be rudimentary, according to Doeleman, but further upgrades would allow EHT to capture the black holes in more and more detail."They might be jerky. They might be low-resolution, but they would be the first steps," Doeleman said in 2019, adding, "When we have 20 [telescope] dishes, that's going to be such a big leap. That will give us the high-fidelity movies that we want to make."

Scientists might reveal the first photo of our galaxy's central black hole on Thursday. Watch their announcement live.

<ul class="summary-list"><li>A new photo of the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/watch-scientists-big-reveal-maybe-photo-milky-way-black-hole-2022-5">supermassive black hole at our galaxy's core</a> looks different from those before.</li><li>A groundbreaking collaboration of black-hole-imaging scientists published it on Wednesday.</li></ul>The supermassive black hole at the heart of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/vanishing-radio-signals-mystery-objects-in-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-1">our galaxy</a> has a side you've never seen before.A new image shows <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/photo-black-hole-magnetic-field-event-horizon-telescope-2021-3">powerful magnetic fields</a> swirling around our hometown black hole called Sagittarius A*, pronounced "A-star."The image is the latest innovation of a groundbreaking scientific collaboration called the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/event-horizon-telescope-black-hole-snaps-first-image-messier-87-2019-4">Event Horizon Telescope</a>, or EHT, which rallied telescopes across the planet to focus on one black hole together, effectively creating an observatory as big as Earth.Five years ago, the EHT released <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-m87-2019-4">the first-ever photo of a supermassive black hole</a>, a feat thought to be impossible for decades because black holes are objects so dense that not even light can escape them, making them invisible.But the disc of ultra-hot material circling a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/listen-nasa-reveals-black-hole-sounds-spooky-audio-2022-8">black hole</a>, which you can see in the image below of a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy called Messier 87, is visible.<div type="image" title="first image of a black hole m87" height="1515" width="2600" msid="108827869" hostid="261"></div>Not long after that, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5">Sagittarius A*</a> got its moment in the limelight.Sagittarius A*'s 2022 portrait, below, looked quite similar to Messier 87's, even though Sagittarius A* is about 1,000 times smaller than Messier 87's black hole.<div type="image" title="black hole photo orange ring sagitarrius A*" height="2000" width="2000" msid="108827870" hostid="261"></div>But the new image released on Wednesday is different. It shows our galaxy's black hole in polarized light, which occurs when <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/colliding-black-holes-produce-light-astronomers-flare-first-time-2020-6">light waves</a> oscillate in a preferred direction.The new view below reveals a clear polarization pattern in the particles circling the black hole — which means powerful magnetic fields spiraling around the edge of Sagittarius A* affect them."What we're seeing now is that there are strong, twisted, and organized magnetic fields near the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy," Sara Issaoun, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the co-lead of the project, said in a press release.<h2>A clue about the secret structure of supermassive black holes</h2>Sagittarius A* is about 27,000 light-years away from Earth, so this image represents a very tiny point in the sky."This appears the same size in the sky as a donut on the moon," Issaoun said at a press conference presenting the first image of it in 2022.But the discovery of the magnetic-field lines offers a major clue about the behavior of supermassive black holes across the universe and how they eat the material surrounding them.The EHT had previously imaged its first black hole, Messier 87, in polarized light, though it doesn't look quite as striking.<div type="image" title="black hole image shows a glowing red disk with its lower half bright yellow full of streaks arcing outward" height="650" width="644" msid="108827872" hostid="261"></div>Since both black holes have similar magnetic-field structures despite their immense size difference, the EHT scientists now suspect that all supermassive black holes might have magnetic structures like this."We've learned that strong and ordered magnetic fields are critical to how black holes interact with the gas and matter around them," Issaoun said.The discovery also suggests that, like Messier 87, Sagittarius A* could have a jet of radiation and <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-accelerators-cosmic-rays-rain-down-speed-of-light-2024-1">high-speed particles</a> shooting out of the black hole. We just can't see it yet.<div type="image" title="An artist's impression shows a jet of matter spewing from a black hole." height="2160" width="3840" msid="108827873" hostid="261"></div>The telescope observations that led to this new image took place in 2017, but the EHT is poised to cast its gaze at Sagittarius A* again in April.Issaoun and her collaborators published their findings in two papers in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Wednesday.<h2>Bigger black-hole breakthroughs may be in store</h2>Further imaging with new innovative techniques and technologies could reveal even more secrets of supermassive black holes, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-hole-how-big-largest-universe-2019-5">both big and small</a>.The EHT aims to capture <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/video-black-hole-milky-way-center-2019-10">video of our galaxy's black hole</a>, possibly by the end of the decade, Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist on the project, told Business Insider at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January."We think we're just scratching the surface of what can be done," Johnson said in a presentation at that meeting. "Even more exciting science is yet to come."To that end, the EHT recently added a telescope in Greenland to its worldwide array.Incorporating satellites into that array, thereby expanding the EHT observatory into space, could allow scientists to study dozens of black holes instead of just two. Johnson said that's likely to happen within a decade.

This new photo of a supermassive black hole is unlike any before, showing powerful magnetic fields spiraling around it

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists might have discovered the first signs of the gravitational-wave background: a sea of ripples in space-time reverberating throughout the universe.</li><li><keyword id="6417558" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="albert-einstein">Albert Einstein</keyword> first predicted the existence of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-wave-experiment-ligo-cracked-einstein-mystery-2020-11">gravitational waves</a>. They have recently been detected following violent collisions of <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/space-collision-gravitational-waves-reveal-impossible-black-hole-2020-9">black holes</a> and <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-waves-new-class-of-collision-neutron-stars-2020-1">neutron stars</a>.</li><li>By monitoring dead stars throughout our galaxy, scientists found a signal that could be a steady thrum of <keyword id="1860685" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="gravitational-waves">gravitational waves</keyword> radiating from distant galaxies as supermassive <keyword id="4740034" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="black-holes">black holes</keyword> collide.</li></ul>Scientists may be on the brink of discovering a new phenomenon reverberating throughout the cosmos: a steady thrum of ripples in space-time.Albert Einstein first predicted that colliding massive objects like black holes would create such ripples, called gravitational waves. But he thought that the noise and vibrations on Earth would prevent us from ever being able to detect these waves. In that aspect, Einstein was wrong. One of the most remarkable experiments in history - the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (<keyword id="6562538" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="ligo">LIGO</keyword>) - detected gravitational waves for the first time in 2015.Those waves came from two black holes that crashed 1.3 billion light-years away, sending out ripples that eventually traveled through our planet and registered in LIGO's giant, L-shaped detectors in Washington and Louisiana. Three researchers who helped conceive of the experiment earned a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/2017-nobel-prize-in-physics-gravitational-waves-kip-thorne-rainer-weiss-barry-barish-2017-10">Nobel Prize in physics</a>.Since that first discovery, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/gravitational-wave-experiment-ligo-cracked-einstein-mystery-2020-11">LIGO and its Italian counterpart, Virgo, have detected likely gravitational waves at least 50 times</a>, from various combinations of black holes and neutron stars colliding.But these are just the most obvious instances of gravitational waves - violent bursts of radiation from some of the most massive collisions in the universe. Theoretically, the cosmos should also be vibrating with a constant low-level hum of gravitational waves reverberating from merging galaxies across the universe.<div type="image" title="galaxies collide collision hubble spiral galaxy" height="789" width="1052" msid="80254183" hostid="261"></div>Scientists think that the center of every large galaxy contains a supermassive black hole that's millions or even billions of times more massive than the colliding objects that LIGO and Virgo have detected. These supermassive black holes should merge when galaxies crash into each other and slowly become one. The hypothetical hum from that activity throughout the universe is referred to as the "gravitational-wave background," or GWB.But nobody has discovered definitive evidence of it yet.That's where the new research comes in. Astrophysicists at the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) have detected what may be the first signs of this background radiation in space-time. Their <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/abd401/meta?casa_token=wqZzq-jPzq8AAAAA:D_REFgAAunFS0KcNWM6IJ_Pa4BqyvK_gn1PpYgHuxiJWqYwo9DUXfEuvAUszVkQXkXtQzEBIoxocsXggfwE">research was published</a> in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters."These enticing first hints of a gravitational-wave background suggest that supermassive black holes likely do merge, and that we are bobbing in a sea of gravitational waves rippling from supermassive black hole mergers in galaxies across the universe," Julie Comerford, an astrophysicist on the NANOGrav team and an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/today/2021/01/11/gravitational-waves">press release</a>.<h2>A gravitational-wave observatory the size of our galaxy</h2><div type="image" title="nanograv gravitational waves pulsar observatory galaxy" height="1134" width="1512" msid="80254188" hostid="261"></div>To search for the gravitational-wave background, the NANOGrav researchers sought to imitate LIGO on a much larger scale.LIGO works by shooting out a laser beam and splitting it in two. The light then travels down the detector's two 2.5-mile-long arms. The beams bounce off mirrors at the ends of those arms and converge back near the beam splitter, where they should cancel each other out. But when a gravitational wave comes through, it warps space-time - making one tube slightly longer and the other shorter for a brief moment. As a result, the two beams return to the splitter at different times, resulting in flashes of light.NANOGrav works in a similar way. But instead of mirrors, it uses millisecond pulsars: extremely dense dead stars that spin rapidly, sending a burst of light towards Earth every millisecond. Their precise timekeeping rivals an atomic clock, so these celestial objects are ideal for detecting changes in the fabric of space-time.Just as LIGO researchers detect gravitational waves by measuring changes in the arrival times of light beams, NANOGrav researchers do so by measuring variations in the arrival times of light from pulsars throughout the galaxy. As gravitational waves move through the cosmos, they squeeze or stretch the distance that this light travels to reach Earth, changing its arrival time by just a few hundred nanoseconds. Some pulsars' lights arrive a little sooner than would be expected, while others arrive a little later."We actually create a galaxy-sized gravitational wave detector within our own Milky Way," Joseph Simon, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the lead author of the new paper, said in a press conference at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society.This method is called a "<keyword id="76971" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="60" keywordseo="Pulsar">pulsar</keyword> timing array."Since the distance between Earth and each of these pulsars is far larger than the length of LIGO's arms, NANOGrav could detect low-frequency gravitational waves that come from faraway mergers of supermassive objects. Unlike the brief outbursts that LIGO detects, these low-frequency waves could be continuously passing through Earth for years or even decades at a time.By simply monitoring the pulsars' lights for a collective, simultaneous shift in timing, scientists should be able to identify the moment when a gravitational wave arrives or leaves our vicinity.To watch pulsars in this way, NANOGrav used the National <keyword id="41551" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="100" keywordseo="science">Science</keyword> Foundation's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/what-earth-lost-when-the-arecibo-telescope-collapsed-2020-12">Arecibo Observatory</a> in Puerto Rico.<div type="image" title="arecibo radio antenna observatory puerto rico overhead view 20050805 naic national science foundation nsf" height="1109" width="1479" msid="80254190" hostid="261"></div>But after two major cable breaks, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/arecibo-radio-telescope-destruction-collapse-failure-puerto-rico-cable-breaks-2020-12">the Arecibo telescope collapsed on itself</a> in December. Its 900-ton platform crashed into the dish below, shattering its panels with no hope of recovery. The researchers were using Arecibo until its first cable failure in August."This is, of course, a major loss for our project," Paul Demorest, a NANOGrav scientist who works at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, said at the AAS meeting.<div type="image" title="arecibo observatory damage radio telescope receiver platform" height="3640" width="4860" msid="80254193" hostid="261"></div><h2>'Oh my God, there's actually something here'</h2>In analyzing data from 45 pulsars - each one observed for at least three years - NANOGrav researchers discovered a coinciding shift in the timing of the pulsars' light. They think this may be the gravitational-wave background."We walked through each of the pulsars one by one. I think we were all expecting to find a few that were the screwy ones throwing off our data," Simon said in the release. "But then we got through them all, and we said, 'Oh my God, there's actually something here.'"The signal is more powerful at lower frequencies, which is what the researchers expect to see in the gravitational-wave background. But to be confident that they've truly discovered this new phenomenon, they need to analyze more data - some of which they've already collected - to make sure the trend holds across datasets."We have this really significant evidence for a common signal. However, we can't quite say what it is yet," Simon said. NANOGrav is now working with two pulsar timing array projects in Europe and Australia to see if they have similar signals in their data.Demorest thinks NANOGrav may get definitive evidence that this is the gravitational-wave background within the next year. Simon said it would probably take longer than that to analyze the data, though.In addition to analyzing new data, Demorest said, NANOGrav will work on expanding its array to include more pulsars and use more sensitive telescopes - ones that haven't even been built yet. Eventually, the scientists hope to pinpoint and study the supermassive black holes that are sending out gravitational ripples."Being able to detect the gravitational-wave background will be a huge step but that's really only step one," Simon said. "Step two is pinpointing what causes those waves and discovering what they can tell us about the universe."

An experiment that reaches across our galaxy has detected the first signs of a possible 'sea' of ripples in space-time

<ul class="summary-list"><li>NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured a stunning image near the heart of the Milky Way.</li><li>The chaotic region appears brilliantly colorful, glittering with the light of 500,000 stars.</li></ul>NASA's <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/mom-revives-her-career-mission-planner-james-webb-space-telescope-2023-9">James Webb Space Telescope</a> has captured a colorful, glittering image of a chaotic region near the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. At the center of the Milky Way, lies a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole that violently warps the very space-time around it, according to research recently published in the peer-reviewed journal <a target="_blank" class="hawk-link-parsed" href="https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/527/1/428/7326786">Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society</a>.Nearby are, "turbulent, magnetized gas clouds that are <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-captures-star-birth-formation-2023-7">forming stars</a>," said Rubén Fedriani of the Instituto Astrofísica de Andalucía in Spain, in a NASA press release.That's exactly what you're seeing in this stunning new JWST image that <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nasa.gov/missions/webb/nasas-webb-reveals-new-features-in-heart-of-milky-way/">NASA released</a> on Monday. The image is of the star-forming region called Sagittarius C. <h2>The perfect place to study stars</h2>Sagittarius C lives only 300 light-years away from the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/first-image-reveals-black-hole-at-milky-way-galaxy-center-2022-5">black hole at the center of our galaxy</a>, which is basically right next door compared to Earth, which is located 25,000 light-years away, per NASA. It's the perfect place for astronomers to study how a generic clump of gas can burst to life in the form of a star that then lives for millions to billions of years."The galactic center is the most extreme environment in our <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/astronomers-discover-fastest-runaway-stars-in-milky-way-galaxy-2023-6">Milky Way galaxy</a>, where current theories of star formation can be put to their most rigorous test," said Jonathan Tan, a professor at the University of Virginia, in the press release.<h2>Revealing never-before-seen objects in our galaxy</h2>Digging into the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-james-webb-space-telescope-best-images-from-first-year-2022-12">JWST image</a> and its wealth of data, astronomers discovered something they'd never seen before. Check out the bright pink cluster circled in orange near the center of the annotated image below:<div type="image" title="image of stars in milky way with features identified" height="720" width="1280" msid="105394202" hostid="261"></div>The cluster is what's called a protostar cluster. Protostars are the early stages of a star. They're compact clumps of gas that just haven't generated enough heat and pressure in their cores, yet, to qualify as a star. Protostars are usually surrounded by dust, which can make them difficult to observe with visible light, according to <a target="_blank" href="https://lco.global/spacebook/stars/protostar/">Las Cumbres Observatory</a>. However, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/times-nasa-webb-space-telescope-spotted-something-hubble-missed">JWST captures infrared light</a> that can see through the dust, making it an ideal instrument for studying protostars. And the powerful space telescope did not disappoint in its new image. In the center of the cluster, JWST revealed a giant protostar 30 times the mass of our sun that astronomers had never seen before, per NASA. Eventually, this enormous protostar will form into a massive star many times more massive than our sun. Massive stars like this don't have very long to live because they burn through their life's fuel very quickly. "In a few million years' time, the ultra-massive object will explode as a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-james-webb-telescope-reveal-new-detail-iconic-supernova-2023-8">supernova</a>, in contrast to stars with masses similar to our sun's that can survive for billions of years," journalist Keith Cooper wrote for <a target="_blank" href="https://www.space.com/star-factory-galactic-center-james-webb-space-telescope">Space.com</a>.<h2>Hundreds of thousands of stars</h2><div type="image" title="An illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope in space." height="429" width="815" msid="105425466" hostid="261" sizebytes="35092"></div>Scientists estimate there are 500,000 stars in the new image.The bright blue section of the photo is a huge emission of ionized hydrogen that results from young massive stars spewing out energetic photons, NASA said. Within the wisps of blue are needle-like structures that shoot out in all directions without rhyme or reason, according to the agency.The sheer size of the cyan-colored region was somewhat of a surprise to scientists, who need to investigate further, NASA said."Webb has provided us with a ton of data on this extreme environment, and we are just starting to dig into it," Fedriani said in the press release.

James Webb Telescope captures colorful, glittering image of the chaotic center of the Milky Way galaxy, revealing never-before-seen details

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Scientists have obtained the first ever proof that black holes can lose energy.</li><li>They've long believed that magnetic fields could suck energy out of black holes but didn't have proof — until now.</li></ul>Scientists have long believed that black holes, which generally swallow up everything around them, can also lose energy.But they didn't have proof — until now.A <a target="_blank" href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acf92d">new study</a> published this month found that the M87 supermassive black hole is emitting huge amounts of energy thanks to its magnetic field.Alexandru Lupsasca, a co-author of the study, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.ias.edu/news/galactic-lightsabers-answering-longstanding-questions-about-jets-black-holes">said</a> the outflow jets "are basically like million-light-year-long Jedi lightsabers" and can be 10 times longer than the Milky Way galaxy.George Wong, the other co-author, said: "If you took the Earth, turned it all into TNT and blew it up 1,000 times a second for millions and millions of years, that's the amount of energy that we're getting out of M87."Space.com <a target="_blank" href="https://www.space.com/supermassive-black-hole-m87-losing-energy">noted</a> that Albert Einstein's theory of relativity predicted that black holes can lose energy and scientists have believed since the 1970s that magnetic fields can extract energy from black holes.But they didn't know how until now.M87 was famous in the scientific community even before this; <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/supermassive-black-hole-first-photo-event-horizon-telescope-m87-2019-4">it was the first black hole ever imaged</a>, and a team of scientists from 20 countries worked for more than a decade to produce the photo.

A supermassive black hole is actually losing energy instead of gobbling it all up, new research shows

<ul class="summary-list"><li>NASA's JWST telescope spotted a bizarre galaxy that defies expectations. </li><li>Galaxy UHZ-1 formed around a huge black hole that existed surprisingly soon after the Big Bang.</li></ul>A bizarre galaxy spotted in the early days of the universe could rewrite how <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/black-holes-can-lose-energy-study-finds-m87-2023-11">supermassive black holes</a> are formed.Scientists have long wondered how supermassive black holes — the enormous, mysterious phenomena at the center of galaxies including our Milky Way — came into existence.A new observation of Galaxy UHZ-1, collected by NASA using its powerful new <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/james-webb-space-telescope-discovers-smallest-brown-dwarf-2023-12">James Webb Space Telescope</a> and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, suggests an unusual origin.Per the agency, it could show that the supermassive black hole there was born directly from clouds of primordial gas.If confirmed, it would show, for the first time, that supermassive black holes are not always formed by dying stars.Such a discovery "changes the game in understanding how these objects formed," said study lead author Priyamvada Natarajan <a target="_blank" href="https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/black-hole-discovery/">while speaking to Science Friday</a>, a non-profit science-education organization."It is simply too big too early. It's like looking in at a kindergarten classroom and there among all the 5-year-olds is one that is 150 pounds and/or six feet tall," Daniel Holz, a theorist at the University of Chicago who studies black holes, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/24/science/space/astronomy-black-holes.html">told The New York Times</a>."Priya has found an extremely exciting black hole, if true," he said.Chandra X-ray Observatory first picked up the black hole by detecting X-rays let off by galaxy UHZ-1.The black hole inside, the observatory found, was a beast — estimated between 10 million and 100 million times as massive as the sun, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2402016-astronomers-have-found-the-most-distant-black-hole-ever-confirmed/">per New Scientist</a>.When JWST set out to figure out where the black hole was located, scientists got a shock: it was inside UHZ-1 about 13.2 billion light years away.The distance meant that this behemoth existed when the universe was very young, only about 470 million years after the Big Bang. It's the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.businessinsider.com/nasa-black-hole-james-webb-space-telescope-discovery-early-universe-2023-11">furthest-flung black hole ever recorded</a>.And that's puzzling. One theory for the formation of supermassive black holes is that they come to be over a long time, The Times reported.Stars at the beginning of the universe were small: they burned what was available, hydrogen and helium, which means they flamed out quickly, leaving smaller black holes about 10 to 100 times bigger than the sun in their wake, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.nasa.gov/missions/chandra/nasa-telescopes-discover-record-breaking-black-hole/">per a press release from NASA</a>.Over time, per this theory, black holes would merge, eventually forming supermassive black holes.But UHZ-1 provides "compelling evidence" for another theory, said study author Natarajan, who is a professor of astronomy and physics at Yale.Per this theory, black holes could be born big from the get-go. This type of galaxy, a big black hole surrounded by a small cloud of gas, could provide a heavy "seed" of a black hole that could grow into a supermassive black hole on its own.Natarajan and her colleagues have dubbed this type of cluster "overmassive black hole galaxies."The supermassive black holes, then, wouldn't be born from early stars. The best explanation instead, per Natarajan, is that they came from cosmic gas collapsing in on itself, creating seeds already weighing between about 10,000 and 100,000 suns."The fact that these start out in life overmassive implies that they will likely eventually evolve into supermassive black holes," said Natarajan, speaking to The Times."Nature does seem to make BH seeds many ways, beyond just stellar death!" she said, per the Times.To confirm their theory, scientists will need more evidence, said Fabio Pacucci at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, per New Scientist. "If this is at a 100 million solar masses it's pretty big, but if it's at 10 million solar masses it's not that big, so it could have possibly formed from a lighter seed," he said."Everything hinges on finding more of these objects, possibly more massive, possibly at even higher distances, to really understand how the first population of black holes formed."The findings were published in a peer-reviewed study in the <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://affiliate.insider.com?h=ff418302a659d6b07cc975f5a9d7b724d6f9dc51cc04519b80294a719b8f802e&amp;postID=658befea8aa21447965669b2&amp;postSlug=strange-galaxy-spotted-nasa-may-rewrite-theory-black-holes-2023-12&amp;site=bi&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticles%2Fs41550-023-02111-9">journal Nature Astronomy</a> on November 6.

A bizarre galaxy NASA spotted at the edge of the universe could upend what we know about supermassive black holes      

The sunburned man with an FTX hat and a Topo Chico strawberry guava hard seltzer in each hand was disappointed. “He’s not naked,” he said to no one in particular, with open disgust. “No hog.”Before him and 20,000 others in the stadium, a shirtless man had jumped from the stands and was sprinting toward the putting green. He front-flipped into a bunker and landed flat on his back, making a sand angel as the crowd roared. Then he darted between police and cacti, swinging his arms along the way to cajole the crowd to cheer more.His display pleased some. But this was Saturday at the 16th hole of Phoenix’s Waste Management Open, also known as the loudest day at the Loudest Hole in Golf, also known as the Greatest Show on Grass. At 1:28 pm, the stadium’s more sober patrons were already about seven drinks deep. They or their employers had paid good money — in some cases <a target="_blank" href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/golf/phoenix-open/2024/02/09/priciest-seats-wm-phoenix-open-cost-24000-dollars-steps-from-16th-tee-pga-tour/72542147007/#">down-payment-on-a-house</a> money — to see something depraved. A streaker who was still wearing pants wasn’t going to cut it.“Booooo!” a man in the deck above me yelled. “Take it all off!”“Show your dick! Show your dick!” chanted a trio of gentlemen in their thirties — Vuori pullover, black Patagonia jacket, and a white Oxford — whose law firm had purchased seats in the box next to me.But there’d be no hog to see. The streaker was apprehended and arrested, prompting rowdy jeers; the crowd was outraged to see justice served.The letdown was short-lived. A few minutes later, a DJ set up shop on a tee box and started playing Creed’s “Take Me Higher” as a montage of Scott Stapp sauntering, F/A-18s taking off in “Top Gun: Maverick,” and Iron Man being awesome played on the Jumbotrons. It had the distinct tone of a hype video a dad with a rudimentary proficiency in Final Cut would make for his 9-year-old son’s birthday, where the party’s theme was “Rad” — and it was exactly what the grown men of the stadium wanted and needed. They watched, enrapt, while they sipped Coors Lights and High Noons and stacked a <a target="_blank" href="https://x.com/MrAzSports/status/1756078060515049532?s=20">beer snake</a> toward heaven.<div type="image" title="A shirtless man holds a &quot;beer snake,&quot; or stacked plastic cups, at the Phoenix Open." height="3917" width="5875" msid="107670054" hostid="261" sizebytes="892724"></div>“Scott Stapp, man,” said a voice behind me, wistfully. “We’re so back.”In theory, this was a professional golf tournament, one of the oldest on the PGA Tour. There was said to be a $9 million purse, and the winner would take home $1.5 million. Occasionally, something would float in from the periphery that suggested the golf could be real: There was a leaderboard, an NBC broadcast of the tournament playing behind every bar, and a group of hedge fund and private equity guys who were taking dozens of prop bets and writing them on a white board they seemed to have brought from the office. There were even flesh and blood golfers who passed by every few minutes, the crowd booing whenever their shot missed the green, and groveling, screeching, barking, grunting, and yipping whenever it inched toward the hole. How they needed to see a ball go into that hole. But in the haze of Topo Chico strawberry guavas, Miller Lites and vodka sodas, the weed, the rain and the mud, the hooting, howling, and the grabassing, no one could be sure they were at a professional sports event. Every other data point suggested that, in reality, they had slipped into exactly where they wanted to be: a black hole of feral manhood. Iwas there as an inevitable result of being in all-male group chat, its own black hole of feral manhood. A Phoenix native in our group of college friends had scored box seats at a discount. For months, the group had been goading one another about how unhinged our pilgrimage would become, sharing clips of obscene spectacles on 16 from years past, along with stories of unhinged behavior in the news cycle — the Alabama man who jumped naked in the Bass Pro Shop aquarium, a resurfaced photo of George Bush drinking Michelob with mustachioed men — and captioning each “us on 16.” We even proposed an official cocktail for the trip, an amalgam of all the viral drinks of the past year: 1 part pumpkin-spiced spiked Dunkin, 1 part spiked Mountain Dew Baja Blast, 1 part Magical Penis Wine, shaken, and filled with Panera’s Charged Lemonade. Most of us are married, with young children, and nearly old enough to run for president. None of us follow golf closely. But the <a target="_blank" href="https://www.golfdigest.com/story/waste-management-drunk-guy-walking">tournament</a> is <a target="_blank" href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/golf/phoenix-open/2018/01/31/waste-management-phoenix-open-streaker/1084895001/">infamous</a> for a <a target="_blank" href="https://www.azcentral.com/story/sports/golf/phoenix-open/2015/01/31/sewage-backed-up-fan-zone-waste-management-phoenix-open/22659121/">reason</a>, its reputation for rowdiness seemingly multiplying the rowdiness each passing year, and its slurring siren song was too tempting to pass up.<div type="image" title="Two people dressed as Oompa Loompas at the Phoenix Open." height="4000" width="6000" msid="107670056" hostid="261" sizebytes="2794486"></div>I could hear the vibes as soon as I landed in Phoenix. In the 10 minutes I waited for my friend to pick me up, the entire pick-up area echoed with daps, vigorous back pats, and chants of “the boys!” as carloads full of the aforementioned boys were reunited for the weekend. The following morning, upon picking us up at 8am, our Lyft driver said, “Welcome to the chaos, brothers.” He’d been shepherding people to and from the tournament for more than a decade, and he had one piece of unsolicited advice: “Stay away from the assholes at BlackRock in the box seats, and you’ll be alright.”At the entrance, the tournament offered its lone nod to decorum: a giant sign across an overpass that reads RESPECT THE FANS. RESPECT THE PLAYERS. RESPECT THE GAME. More than 200,000 would stumble under the sign; a few would abide by it. Several thousand had lined up outside the gate around 3 am to partake in a Running of the Bulls at 5:30, when the coveted generation admission seats on 16 opened.At 10 am, we scanned into the stadium with our wristbands. Though they repeated the overpass mantra, they were also our gateway to 10 strongly poured alcoholic beverages, like a Livestrong bracelet that doubles as a vape pen. Also, the 10-drink cutoff was a very gentle suggestion. Bartender after bartender told group after group, “If you take care of me, I’ll take care of you.” I watched several men in their 40s and 50s tip hundred-dollar-bills after each round, and their wristbands were never scanned. For many, 10 soon became 20, which became face-planting into a urinal.With drinks in hand, we left to stroll around the course. Few were watching golf; most were huddled in circles many yards from the 16th hole, drinking and people-watching. Men outnumbered women, conservatively, 7 to 1. Countless bros wore the standard uniform of a golf cap, a quarter-zip pullover (often Barstool), and khakis. Every SEC team was well-represented. There were men in fitted pink suits, Happy Gilmore Bruins jerseys, and American-flag-patterned shorteralls; four men dressed like Thomas Jefferson; a man standing alone in camo hoodie with “Assholes Live Forever” emblazoned on the back; men in MAGA hats and BlackRock hats; men in their forties in jungle animal onesies; and a bachelor party full of men wearing red chef hats that read “Let Him Cook.” The overall tableau was akin to Mardi Gras meets the “ass to ass” scene in “Requiem for a Dream.”<div type="image" title="A man dressed as a founding father takes a selfie" height="2400" width="3600" msid="107670059" hostid="261" sizebytes="463614"></div>Traipsing through the throngs, I overheard a succession of things that forgotten people from your childhood might say to you in a NyQuil-induced dream. “Jesus Christ, did you see the 17-inch waist on that one? Lord have mercy,” said one man to his boys. “When I met Johnny, he didn’t have a pot to piss in. I was his pot,” said a woman. Mostly, I heard the boys talking about how good it is to be out in the desert with the boys. “Isn’t this the fucking best?” said one. “Dude, how good is this? Blunts and mud,” said another.Torrential rain from the past two days had turned the course into a 200-acre mudslide. Dozens of men and women were sliding down hills, many of them deliberately and shirtlessly. A few fights were breaking out. Not far from the 11th rough, a young woman was hunched over in a miniskirt in the sand, crying. She was receiving oxygen from an EMT in a golf cart, seated beside a cactus and a puddle of her own vomit.It seemed like as good a time as any to return to the belly of the beast.Outside the stadium on 16, the lines for general admission seats were hundreds of people deep. Few had any chance of getting in: Those who were already inside had been drinking nonstop for six hours, and weren’t going to leave unless they were dragged out. Why were so many spending their day on a mission they knew was going to fail? One gentleman voiced his divine wish to his friends: “There’s gonna be one special girl in there who shows her titties. That’s worth the wait.”Inside our box, golf continued to happen, but if the golfers weren’t teeing off, no one was watching the course. A man in his 50s approached a group of four women in their early 20s from ASU’s law school and said, “Do you girls pay attention to technology?” He spent three minutes explaining his AI startup before they walked away. At one point, weaving my way through the crowd toward my seat, a man in a ponytail put his face toward my face and touched my glasses. “Hey, Potter,” he said like an after-school special bully, “just use your wand to get through!” I felt both debased and anointed, a perfect 16 experience.To visit the toilets was to realize fully that no sporting event embodies its name as cosmically as the Waste Management Open. They stood in an unlit room at the end of a long, wet, musty, unlit hal. By 2:00, the plastic urinals — a green, eight-foot-tall structure where four men at a time pee toward each other — were overflowing, urine spilling onto mud-soaked All Birds. Nearly every Porta Potty around the perimeter was filled with cans of hard seltzers. It was incredibly brave of Waste Management to put their logos on those toilets. <div type="image" title="Muddy cup" height="1600" width="2400" msid="107670061" hostid="261" sizebytes="703140"></div>By 4 pm, word spread that the patrons had become so unruly tournament organizers <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/WMPhoenixOpen/status/1756424253262733425">closed the entrance gates</a> and stopped serving alcohol across the course. There was a mild panic. The day before, a woman had been hospitalized after falling off a balcony on 16. Players and pundits argued that the notorious “shitshow” had become too much of a shitshow, that the waste could no longer be managed, and everyone’s safety was at risk. But as several rushed to the bar, they quickly realized that only the plebes were screwed. For the elites — those lucky enough to have a box — the drinks were still bottomless. “We don’t give a shit what happens down there,” said one bartender in an après ski outfit. (After the carnage ended, the tournament's executive director <a target="_blank" class="" href="https://affiliate.insider.com?h=6ff87b1c4c4ea4d173345d83e6b55dc7337f6664a214ae8e6c31e8db87b90f33&amp;postID=65cb9d25ef49b4ccc97798ba&amp;postSlug=phoenix-open-waste-management-golf-drunk-bros-party-2024-2&amp;site=bi&amp;u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.espn.com%2Fgolf%2Fstory%2F_%2Fid%2F39516315%2Fphoenix-open-headed-change-saturday-incidents">promised</a> "a complete operational change," ringing what may well be a death knell for the Open's rowdiest days.)But for the rest of the day, at least, the tournament continued to put bros before holes. A couple of minutes after 6 pm, a tournament official blew an air horn. The mass had ended. The sunset was immaculate — orange-purple halos hugging billowing violet clouds. The man in the FTX hat who wanted to see hog was missing it. He had been asleep for half an hour, and it looked like he pissed himself.

You Searched For "milky way black hole" and got 11 results

The black hole at the center of the Milky Way is spinning so fast, it's squishing space-time down like a football

Grace Eliza Goodwin

A mysterious star from outside the Milky Way has somehow ended up near our galaxy's supermassive black hole

Marianne Guenot

Black hole image supports Einstein's theory of gravity, disappointing scientists who are probing for cracks

Paola Rosa-Aquino

Meet the black hole at the center of our galaxy: Scientists just took its picture for the first time

Morgan McFall-Johnsen,Paola R…

Scientists might reveal the first photo of our galaxy's central black hole on Thursday. Watch their announcement live.

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

This new photo of a supermassive black hole is unlike any before, showing powerful magnetic fields spiraling around it

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

An experiment that reaches across our galaxy has detected the first signs of a possible 'sea' of ripples in space-time

Morgan McFall-Johnsen

James Webb Telescope captures colorful, glittering image of the chaotic center of the Milky Way galaxy, revealing never-before-seen details

Grace Eliza Goodwin

A supermassive black hole is actually losing energy instead of gobbling it all up, new research shows

Sonam Sheth

A bizarre galaxy NASA spotted at the edge of the universe could upend what we know about supermassive black holes

Marianne Guenot

Nine hours at the most unhinged hole in golf

Zak Jason

Popular Keywords

Buying Guides