Latest Active galactic nucleus Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Of all the active galactic nuclei, blazars are the brightest and emit very high-energy gamma rays. A team led by physicists from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), has made new observations of the blazar known as PKS 1424+240 that reveal it is the most distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. The emission spectrum of PKS 1424+240 now appears highly unusual in the light of new data. Data from the Hubble Space...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Astronomers from the University of Colorado Boulder (CU-Boulder) believe that so-called sideline quasars located on the outer fringes of a larger, brighter active galactic nucleus might have joined forces with it to prevent the formation of small galaxies billions of years ago. Michael Shull, a professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences at the university’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, and research...
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...
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The supermassive black hole lies at the dust and gas-filled heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365, and it is...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope recently obtained a three-dimensional view of a distant gravitationally-lensed quasar and discovered complex structures inside outflows coming from the nucleus. The team used the large telescope to observe quasar SDSS J1029+2623, which sits 10 billion light-years away from Earth in the constellation Leo. By using the gravitational lensing technique, astronomers were able to look at this far away...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Click here to stream the “Supermassive Black Holes” podcast (Or right-click on the above link to download the file to your computer) Only a couple decades ago, the mere idea of supermassive black holes – those that are millions or billions of times more massive than our sun – seemed unthinkable to most astronomers. Now, however, we believe that these enormous objects lie at the center of nearly every galaxy in the...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The rapidly expanding problem of obesity doesn't seem to just be limited to here on Earth, because new research published in the Astrophysical Journal suggests black holes are growing at larger rates than what had previously been thought possible Most galaxies have black holes at the center of them that can weigh anywhere from one million to one billion times as much as the Sun. The black hole found in the middle of our Milky Way...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to a study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, there may be more ultramassive black holes in the Universe than previously thought. A new analysis has looked at the brightest galaxies in a sample of 18 galaxy clusters in order to target the largest black holes. The scientists' work suggests that at least ten of the galaxies contain an ultramassive black hole, weighing between 10 and 40 billion times the mass...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online It would be a mistake to think of black holes as having a uniformity of size or mass. They range from modest objects formed from the end of an individual stars' life to behemoths billions of times more massive that rule the centers of galaxies. A new study recently published in the journal Science, however, shows that high-speed jets launched from active black holes share fundamental similarities despite the mass, age or...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The universe has had traces of heavy elements such as carbon and oxygen as far back in time as astronomers have been able to see. Elements such as these were originally churned from the explosion of massive stars. They formed the building blocks for planetary bodies, and eventually for life on Earth. Peering back far in time, a research team from MIT, Caltech, and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) found matter...
Latest Active galactic nucleus Reference Libraries
Seyfert Galaxy -- Seyfert galaxies are spiral or irregular galaxies containing an extremely bright nucleus, most likely caused by a supermassive black hole, that can sometimes outshine the surrounding galaxy. The light from the central nucleus varies in less than a year, which implies that the emitting region must be less than one light year across. They are named for the astronomer Carl Seyfert, who studied them extensively in the 1940s. They are a subclass of active galactic nuclei....
Quasar -- A quasar (from quasi-stellar radio source) is an astronomical object that looks like a star in optical telescopes (i.e. it is a point source), but has a very high redshift. The general consensus is that this high redshift is cosmological, the result of Hubble's law and that their redshift indicates that they are typically very distant from Earth; we observe them as they were several billions of years ago. Since we can see them despite their distance, they must emit more...
Active Galaxy -- An active galaxy is a galaxy where a significant fraction of the energy output is not emitted from normal stellar populations or interstellar gas. This energy, depending on the active galaxy type, can be emitted across most of the electromagnetic spectrum, as infrared, radio waves, UV, X-ray and gamma rays. Frequently, the abbreviation AGN (Active Galactic Nuclei) is used, since most of the active galaxies emit most of their radiation from a narrow region in their...
Circinus Galaxy -- Resembling a swirling witch's cauldron of glowing vapors, the black hole-powered core of a nearby active galaxy appears in this colorful NASA Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy lies 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation Circinus. This galaxy is designated a type 2 Seyfert, a class of mostly spiral galaxies that have compact centers and are believed to contain massive black holes. Seyfert galaxies are themselves part of a larger class of objects...
