pair instability

"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell Ever since we created a question/suggestion box here, we've been deluged by far more excellent questions than one person could possibly answer, but that doesn't mean we aren't trying! For this week's Ask Ethan, our question comes from long-time fan and reader crd2, who asks: As we look at the furthest quasars we see they have supermassive black holes, as large as 109 solar masses. By what mechanism are they able to reach such large sizes over so short a…

"Black holes, which have no memory, are said to contain the earliest memories of the universe, and the most recent, too, while at the same time obliterating all memory by obliterating all its embodiments. Such paradoxes characterize these strange galactic monsters, for whom creation is destruction, death life, chaos order." -Robert Coover Our Milky Way, the swath of light and dark that dominates the darkest skies here on Earth, contains a huge variety of stars: large and small, red and blue, from young to old to ancient. Image credit: ESO / Serge Brunier, Frederic Tapissier, The World At…