Latest Black hole Stories
WASHINGTON, April 30, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An extraordinary outburst produced by a black hole in a nearby galaxy has provided direct evidence for a population of old, volatile stellar black holes. The discovery, made by astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, provides new insight into the nature of a mysterious class of black holes that can produce as much energy in X-rays as a million suns radiate at all wavelengths. (Logo:...
The hunt is on for a class of supermassive black holes, as scientists at NASA are using a infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope in order to hunt-down the compact quasars typically associated with the phenomenon, officials at the US space agency revealed on Thursday. Using data obtained from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), astronomers have discovered more than 200 of these blazing quasi-stellar objects, and the potential is there to find thousands of additional...
Idan Ginsburg, a graduate student in Dartmouth's Department of Physics and Astronomy, studies some of the fastest moving objects in the cosmos. When stars and their orbiting plants wander too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, their encounter with the black hole's gravitational force can either capture them or eject them from the galaxy, like a slingshot, at millions of miles per hour. Although their origin remains a mystery and although they are...
Astronomers from the U.K., France and Germany have discovered vast amounts of gas and dust in the galaxy containing the most distant supermassive black hole known to science. Galaxy J1120+0641 is so far away, that light from it takes over 13 billion years to reach our planet. This means the light astronomers see from this galaxy is just 740 million years after the Big Bang. The team used the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimetrique (IRAM) array to make their discovery. This array...
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics researchers have determined that some planets are flying around in space at 30 million miles per hour. These hypervelocity planets are produced in the same way as the hypervelocity star that was found seven years ago traveling around the Milky Way Galaxy at 1.5 million miles per hour. "These warp-speed planets would be some of the fastest objects in our Galaxy," astrophysicist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in...
In space, it sometimes happens that two galaxies are aligned in just the right way that the closer galaxy distorts and magnifies the appearance of the one behind it. For astronomers, finding these alignments is like coming across giant, cosmic magnifying glasses. Now, a team of astronomers, including Daniel Stern from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., has found several rare examples of this phenomenon, called gravitational lensing, in which the foreground galaxy hosts...
Pulsars, superdense neutron stars, are perhaps the most extraordinary physics laboratories in the Universe. Research on these extreme and exotic objects already has produced two Nobel Prizes. Pulsar researchers now are poised to learn otherwise-unavailable details of nuclear physics, to test General Relativity in conditions of extremely strong gravity, and to directly detect gravitational waves with a "telescope" nearly the size of our Galaxy. Neutron stars are the remnants of massive...
Astronomers are building a virtual telescope as big as our planet that will capture the first ever picture outlining an enormous black hole within our galaxy. The Event Horizon Telescope will be powerful enough to see all the way to the center of the Milky Way, where the super massive black hole lives. Researchers believe by capturing an image of the black hole, it will allow astrophysicists to put Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity to the test. Scientists from related fields...
WASHINGTON, Jan. 10, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Using observations from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite and the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) radio telescope, an international team of astronomers has identified the moment when a black hole in our galaxy launched superfast knots of gas into space. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) Racing outward at about one-quarter the speed of light,...
Latest Black hole Reference Libraries
X-Ray Astronomy -- Although the more energetic X-rays (E > 30 keV) can penetrate the air at least for distances of a few meters (they would never have been detected and medical X-ray machines would not work if this was not the case) the Earth's atmosphere is thick enough that virtually none are able to penetrate from outer space all the way to the Earth's surface. X-rays in the 0.5 - 5 keV range, where most celestial sources give off the bulk of their energy, can be stopped by a few...
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...
Cygnus X-1 -- Cygnus X-1 (often abbreviated to Cyg X-1) is an X-ray source in the Cygnus constellation considered to be one of the most likely black hole candidates. The optical counterpart (HDE 226868) is a variable 8.9 magnitude star (visible with good binoculars in good observing conditions.) at right ascension 19 h 56.5 min and declination of 35 deg 4 min (for 1950 epoch). Cyg X-1 is a binary star that contains a O9-B0 supergiant (with a surface temperature of 31000 Kelvin) and a...
![Artist\](/media/gallery/xmm-newton/thumbs/thumbs_xmm-newton_outflows_b_full.jpg "Artist\")
