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Space

What happens at a black hole's edge? It depends on your perspective

To find out what happens at the centre of a black hole, we may need to consider its event horizon - and think about where we're looking from, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

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Mind

Could we share dreams by synchronising REM sleep?

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Earth

What would Earth look like in 25 years? I asked the experts

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What would Earth look like in 25 years? I asked the experts

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Environment

Cool solutions could head off the climate-damaging rush for air con

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Physics

How physics is helping us to explain why time always moves forwards

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Life

Could we merge biologically with the fungal network and live forever?

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EM8P22 AshleyMadison.com, the dating site for primarily married people, is seen on Wednesday, April 15, 2015. Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, announced that it will be pursuing a initial public offering in London this year hoping to raise $200 million. (? Richard B. Levine)

Technology

What everyone gets wrong about the 2015 Ashley Madison scandal

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Environment

Embrace wooden buildings for the sake of your health and the planet's

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This new visualization of a black hole illustrates how its gravity distorts our view, warping its surroundings as if seen in a carnival mirror. The visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole where infalling matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole?s extreme gravity skews light emitted by different regions of the disk, producing the misshapen appearance. Bright knots constantly form and dissipate in the disk as magnetic fields wind and twist through the churning gas. Nearest the black hole, the gas orbits at close to the speed of light, while the outer portions spin a bit more slowly. This difference stretches and shears the bright knots, producing light and dark lanes in the disk. Viewed from the side, the disk looks brighter on the left than it does on the right. Glowing gas on the left side of the disk moves toward us so fast that the effects of Einstein?s relativity give it a boost in brightness; the opposite happens on the right side, where gas moving away us becomes slightly dimmer. This asymmetry disappears when we see the disk exactly face on because, from that perspective, none of the material is moving along our line of sight. Closest to the black hole, the gravitational light-bending becomes so excessive that we can see the underside of the disk as a bright ring of light seemingly outlining the black hole. This so-called ?photon ring? is composed of multiple rings, which grow progressively fainter and thinner, from light that has circled the black hole two, three, or even more times before escaping to reach our eyes. Because the black hole modeled in this visualization is spherical and non-rotating, the photon ring looks nearly circular and identical from any viewing angle. Inside the photon ring is the black hole?s shadow, an area roughly twice the size of the event horizon ? its point of no return. This visualization is ?mass invariant,? which means it can represent a black hole of any mass. The size of the black hole's shadow is proportional to its mass, but so is the size of the accreetion disk, so its properties scale accordingly. Simulations and movies like these really help us visualize what Einstein meant when he said that gravity warps the fabric of space and time.

Physics

How the weird and powerful pull of black holes made me a physicist

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Environment

Could we live in tree cities grown from giant sequoia in the future?

This week our new Future Chronicles column, which explores an imagined history of inventions of the future, visits carbon negative cities: forest homes grown from giant sequoia, genetically engineered for rapid growth. Rowan Hooper is our guide

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Mind

How the US used science to wage psychological war

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Environment

Why carbon offsetting your flight isn't the answer

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Environment

The shift to LED lighting is stopping us from seeing our night skies

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Technology

Why curbing chatbots' worst exploits is a game of whack-a-mole

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