Latest Accretion disc Stories

John P. Millis, PhD for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One of the challenges of studying black holes – incredibly dense stellar remnants arising from massive supernova explosions – is that it is extremely difficult to measure the spin of such objects. And it is this motion that is of particular interest, since Einstein’s theory of General Relativity predicts that the gravitational waves produced from their rotation can distort the very fabric of space-time around these massive...

Watch the video "Magneto-Spin Alignment Effect Movie (Black Hole Jet)" April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Black holes are voracious monsters at the center of galaxies that shape the growth and death of the stars around them with their tremendous gravitational pull and explosive ejections of energy.  "Over its lifetime, a black hole can release more energy than all the stars in a galaxy combined," explains Roger Blandford, Stanford professor, director of the Kavli...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online An international team of astronomers was able to measure the radius of a black hole for the first time. Researchers measured the radius of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, which lies about 50 million light-years away from the Milky Way. M87 has a black hole 6 billion times more massive than the Sun, and the team was able to observe the glow of matter near the edge of the black hole, or the "event horizon," using radio...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Despite seventy percent of the Earth’s surface being covered by water, in reality the whole of the planet is only made up of 1 percent water, making it relatively dry compared to the gas giants, such as Jupiter and Neptune. And now, that dryness, which has long perplexed scientists, has been explained by a team of scientists working at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) in Baltimore, Maryland. The standard model...

Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com Gamma-ray beams seen in the Milky Way's central black hole suggest that the galaxy's center was much more active in the past, according to new research. Harvard University astrophysicists used an image taken by NASA's Fermi space telescope to reveal gamma-rays from the Milky Way millions of years ago. "These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago," Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...

Black holes that grow to masses billions of times greater than that of our sun most likely reached those sizes by consuming objects from multiple locations at the same time, researchers from the UK and Australia claim in a new study set for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In a Friday press release, officials with the University of Leicester, who conducted the study along with colleagues from Australia's Monash University, compared the process...

Active galactic nucleiBy studying the X-rays emitted when superheated gases plunge into distant and massive black holes, astrophysicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have provided an important test of a long-standing theory that describes the extreme physics occurring when matter spirals into these massive objects.Matter falling into black holes emits tremendous amounts of energy which can escape as visible light, ultraviolet light and X-rays. This energy can also drive outflows of...

Two UK astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the center of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe. Dr Alejo Martinez-Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Prof. Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford made the new discovery by using radio, optical and X-ray data. They publish their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.There is strong evidence that every galaxy has a black hole in its...

Astrophysicists use computer simulations to gain new insights on star formationThe first stars in the universe were not as solitary as previously thought. In fact, they could have formed alongside numerous companions when the gas disks that surrounded them broke up during formation, giving birth to sibling stars in the fragments. These are the findings of studies performed with the aid of computer simulations by researchers at Heidelberg University's Centre for Astronomy together with...

Using two of the world's largest telescopes, an international team of astronomers have found evidence of a collision between galaxies driving intense activity in a highly luminous quasar. The scientists, led by Montserrat Villar Martin of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucía-CSIC in Spain, used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) on La Palma in the Canary Islands, to study activity from the quasar SDSS J0123+00. They publish their work in a...