iwNEWS: Scientists fill a void by shining light into black holes

Wall Street Journal reporter Marc Kaufman wrote an insightful piece on the enormous scientific scrutiny black holes are receiving. The article offers great fodder for new, more informed science fiction, I think, and a good introduction for the lay person like myself.

Over the past 10 years, Kaufman said, black holes have moved to the center of the world of astrophysics, leading to a steady flow of discoveries that have begun to answer, or at least better describe, some of their mysteries.

He writes: “The fast pace of recent discoveries has set the stage for a new generation of sophisticated observatories, which together have been dubbed Beyond Einstein by NASA. While several of the proposed satellites would study black holes, the most pertinent is Constellation-X, a four-telescope X-ray observatory planned to be 100 times as powerful as any instrument now available for investigating X-ray radiation and black holes.”