To paraphrase a character in the film, The Black Hole walks "a tightrope;" if not between "genius" and "insanity," then certainly between "genius" and "banality". If you're looking at this movie as a Manichean exercise between darkness and light, then you can -- for at least a few hours -- entertain the "genius" part of that equation.
posted by Trurl on Sep 25, 2011 - 106 comments

Cosmic Journeys is a documentary series on various astronomical and space-related subjects, e.g. supermassive black holes, Apollo 12, whether the universe is infinite and many more. The creators, SpaceRip have a lot of other, shorter videos online as well. They are indexed here. Most, if not all, of the videos are available in HD.
posted by Kattullus on Dec 30, 2010 - 2 comments

Maybe the entire universe as we know it really is just sitting inside a black hole of another, bigger universe.
posted by molecicco on Jul 29, 2010 - 104 comments

Listening through a telescope the Chandra X-ray observatory hears a black hole.
posted by wobh on Sep 11, 2003 - 12 comments

In space, you can hear a black hole sing (WaPo link). Using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, astrophysicists have detected a supermassive black hole in the Perseus Cluster which has been "playing" a B-flat for 3 billion years.

Fascinating as this seemingly counterintuitive discovery (sound carrying through space) is, the real significance lies in that these "sound waves" may explain why the superhot gases in such regions aren't cooling down and forming more stars.
posted by GreyWingnut on Sep 10, 2003 - 19 comments

Massive explosion rocks NASA And Pasadena, and a few other places, too. It's not every day you get to watch a black hole form. Includes cool animation (.mov file). Seems the gamma ray burst detector picks up two or three significant events every month or so.
posted by kewms on Mar 20, 2003 - 13 comments

Astronomers claim a massive black hole orbits our galaxy sweeping from the outskirts to the core while cryptozoologists claim bigfoot was documented on a 1930s vegetable packing crate.
posted by KirkJobSluder on Sep 14, 2001 - 8 comments

The stars in the core of our galaxy are moving damned fast. [more]
posted by Steven Den Beste on Dec 20, 2000 - 20 comments