Couple randomly attacked, 1 stabbed, by group of teens in Toronto, police say
A man has been transported to hospital after police say he was stabbed in a random attack carried out by a group of teens in Toronto on Friday night.
An ultramassive black hole, understood to be one of the largest ever detected, has been discovered by astronomers using a new technique.
The findings, published by the Royal Astronomical Society, show that the black hole is more than 30 billion times the mass of the sun -- a scale rarely seen by astronomers.
The researchers described it as an "extremely exciting" discovery that opens up "tantalizing" possibilities for detecting further black holes.
The team, led by Durham University in the United Kingdom, used a technique known as gravitational lensing -- whereby a nearby galaxy is used as a giant magnifying glass to bend the light from a more distant object. This enabled them to closely examine how light is bent by a black hole inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light years from Earth.
Supercomputer simulations and images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope were also used to confirm the size of the black hole.
This is the first black hole found using gravitational lensing, with the team simulating light travelling through the universe hundreds of thousands of times, according to a news release from the Royal Astronomical Society.
"This particular black hole, which is roughly 30 billion times the mass of our Sun, is one of the biggest ever detected and on the upper limit of how large we believe black holes can theoretically become, so it is an extremely exciting discovery," lead study author James Nightingale, an observational cosmologist from the Department of Physics at Durham University, said.
"Most of the biggest black holes that we know about are in an active state, where matter pulled in close to the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of light, X-rays, and other radiation," Nightingale added.
"However, gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, something not currently possible in distant galaxies. This approach could let us detect many more black holes beyond our local universe and reveal how these exotic objects evolved further back in cosmic time."
Researchers believe the finding is significant as it "opens up the tantalising possibility that astronomers can discover far more inactive and ultramassive black holes than previously thought" and "investigate how they grew so large," according to the news release.
The story of this particular discovery started back in 2004 when fellow Durham University astronomer, Alastair Edge, a research fellow, noticed a giant arc of a gravitational lens when reviewing images of a galaxy survey, according to the news release.
The team has now revisited the discovery and explored it further with the help of NASA's Hubble telescope and the DiRAC COSMA8 supercomputer.
Ultramassive black holes are the most massive objects in the universe and a rare find for astronomers.
Their origins are unclear, with some believing they were formed from the merging of galaxies billions of years ago.
Each time a galaxy merges with another one, stars are lost and a black hole gains mass -- which accounts for the incredibly high mass of some black holes.
A man has been transported to hospital after police say he was stabbed in a random attack carried out by a group of teens in Toronto on Friday night.
Ron Ellis, who played over 1,000 games with the Toronto Maple Leafs and was a member of Canada's team at the 1972 Summit Series, has died at age 79.
The wildfire that sparked Friday and caused evacuation orders for more than 3,000 people in Fort Nelson, B.C., and the nearby Fort Nelson First Nation, has grown to nearly 1,700 hectares in size, according to a Saturday morning update from the BC Wildfire Service.
Hours before the final, Dutch contestant Joost Klein was dramatically booted out by organizers over a backstage incident. He had failed to perform at two dress rehearsals on Friday, and contest organizer the European Broadcasting Union said it was investigating an "incident."
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The Canada Science and Technology Museum is inviting visitors to explore their poop. A new exhibition opens at the Ottawa museum on Friday called, 'Oh Crap! Rethinking human waste.'
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Just as she had feared, a restaurant owner from eastern Quebec who visited Montreal had her SUV stolen, but says it was all thanks to the kindness of strangers on the internet — not the police — that she got it back.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
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