Click the tartan to view its entry in The Scottish Registers of Tartans which includes registration details, restrictions, and registrant information.
Unregistered tartans may link to one of the web's online design environments for similar information.
For any questions about reproduction of designs or weaving of these tartans, please contact the registrant directly or via this website.
Black Hole Friday
"A black hole teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper, time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and the laws of physics can be obliterated like a crushed watch."
~ John Archibald Wheeler
Black Hole Friday, an informal term for the Friday following Thanksgiving in the United States, has been cleverly repurposed by astronomers and science educators to spotlight the fascinating study of black holes! The concept of a body so massive that even light couldn’t escape dates back to November 1784, when English clergyman and astronomical pioneer John Michell proposed the idea in a letter. Later, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of black holes in 1916 through his general theory of relativity, though the term “black hole” wasn’t coined until 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler.
After decades of theoretical exploration, the first physical black hole was discovered in 1971. Black holes vary greatly in size, ranging from miniature to colossal, with the supermassive black holes reigning as the universe’s giants—some boasting masses billions of times that of our sun! In our Milky Way galaxy alone, scientists estimate there are about 100 million stellar-mass black holes, along with the supermassive Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at its core, containing the mass of roughly 4 million suns.
In a recent breakthrough in 2020, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observed dramatic dark and light rays emanating from the bright center of IC 5063, an active galaxy 156 million light-years away in the constellation Indus. Researchers believe a torus-shaped ring of dusty material surrounding IC 5063’s central black hole is casting an extraordinary X-shaped shadow into space. The mysteries of black holes continue to inspire wonder and exploration! 🖤 💜 💙 ❤️ 💛 🤍 🖤 ☀️ ⚫ 🔭
Humorously celebrated by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) "Black Hole Friday" (a pun on the traditional post Thanksgiving shopping day in the United States called "Black Friday") is used to educate and spread awareness of Astronomy in general, and black holes in particular.
The past years have seen spectacular advancements in the sciences, but particularly for the repeated observation of gravitational waves. In 2017, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded physicists Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish the Nobel Prize in physics for directly detecting gravitational waves—wrinkles in space-time predicted more than a century ago by Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but which had been elusive until 2015.
The most recent observations were made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a large-scale physics experiment and observatory designed to detect cosmic gravitational waves and to develop gravitational-wave observations as an astronomical tool.
Gravitational waves are 'ripples' in the fabric of space-time caused by some of the most violent and energetic processes in the Universe. Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves in his general theory of relativity.
As of now, gravitational waves have been detected multiple times by collisions of black holes and most recently, by the collision of two neutron stars, a special event because this allows physicist to correlate the wave event with something visible!
The first detected observable wave was created when two black holes spiraled toward one another. Ripples in spacetime spread from the collision at the speed of light until, for about a second on December 25, 2015 (if you were in the United States), the space holding the atoms that make you up buckled and then relaxed.
The waves first hit the observatory/detector in Livingston, Louisiana, and then 1.1 milliseconds later passed through the one in Hanford, Washington. For this event, space buckled enough to move the mirrors of both detectors by 0.7 attometers. That’s 7 tenths of a millionth of a trillionth of a meter!
On April 10, 2019, the first image of a black hole, showing the ring of bright gasses emitted near the black hole's event horizon was released. Two telescopes on Maunakea – the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and Submillimeter Array (SMA) – joined six other observatories around the world to take part in the unprecedented Event Horizon Telescope project, resulting in the April 2017 capture of a look at the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, which is about 50 million light years away.
Astronomers collaborated with renowned Hawaiian language and cultural practitioner Dr. Larry Kimura for the Hawaiian naming of the black hole. Pōwehi, meaning embellished dark source of unending creation, is a name sourced from the Kumulipo, the primordial chant describing the creation of the Hawaiian universe.
Carol A.L. Martin's tartan "Black Hole" is designed to reflect the fundamentals of our universe - galaxies, black holes and quasars.
Click the photo of the latest Hubble photography of galaxy IC 5063 from NASA.