NuSTAR Observes Dormant Black Hole In Nearby Sculptor Galaxy
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory caught signs of what appeared to be a black hole eating gas at the middle of the nearby Sculptor Galaxy nearly a decade ago. A new observation by NASA’s...
Latest Black holes Stories
GREENBELT, Md., June 14, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new study by astronomers at NASA, Johns Hopkins University and the Rochester Institute of Technology confirms long-held suspicions about how stellar-mass black holes produce their highest-energy light. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Our work traces the complex motions, particle interactions and turbulent magnetic fields in billion-degree gas on the threshold of a black hole, one of the most...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The entire Milky Way galaxy revolves around a supermassive black hole, which is surrounded by a turbulent expanse of space fraught with extreme gravitational forces. Despite the inhospitable nature of this region, a team of American astronomers has found jets of material that typically indicate star formation when found in less tumultuous sections of the universe, according to their report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters....
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Black holes are incredibly difficult objects to understand, partially because their very existence seemingly challenges the physical laws of the Universe. Because of their extreme nature, various peculiarities arise that give scientists pause. One such case was proposed by Stephen Hawking, the famed cosmologist, back in the 1970s. He noted that because of the extreme gravity that exists within the event horizon of a black...
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...
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...
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...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Black holes of any size are mysterious, seemingly breaking through the barriers of the physical laws that guide our Universe. Formed under extreme conditions -- such as the collapse of a massive star, some ten times the mass of our Sun or more -- these objects are very difficult to study under any conditions. Most puzzling are a class of black holes that can range in size from millions to billions of solar masses. Such...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Click here to stream "Facts About Black Holes – Separating Myth From Reality" (Or right-click on the above link to download the file to your computer) When most people think of a black hole, they tend to envision it as sort of cosmic vacuum cleaner, slowly sucking in and devouring everything in its vicinity. But are black holes really like this? And what would happen if you fell into a black hole? What about a...
Latest Black holes Reference Libraries
Supermassive Black Hole -- A Supermassive black hole is a black hole with a mass in the range of millions or billions solar masses. A supermassive black hole has some interesting properties differing from his low-mass cousins: -- The average density of a supermassive black hole can be very low, and actually can be lower than water's density. This happens because the black hole diameter increases linearly with mass, and consequently density drops much faster. -- Strong tidal...
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....
Microquasar -- Microquasars are smaller cousins of quasars. They are named after quasars, as they have some common characteristics: strong and variable radio emission often seen as radio jets, and an accretion disk surrounding a black hole. In quasars, the black hole is supermassive (millions of solar masses) as in microquasars, the black hole mass is a few solar masses. In microquasars, the accreted mass comes from a normal star and the accretion disk is very luminous in optical regions...
Event Horizon -- The event horizon is a boundary beyond which information will never reach an observer. An event horizon is a mathematical construct and not a physical object and a person passing through an event horizon will not notice any odd behavior. From an outside observer however, an object passing though an event horizon will appear redder and dimmer and will appear to freeze at the moment the object passes the event horizon. An event horizon can form around a gravitational...
Black Hole -- Black holes are objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravity. They are believed to form from the gravitational collapse of astronomical objects containing two or more solar masses. Astronomical observations suggest that the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, contain supermassive black holes containing millions to billions of solar masses. Black holes are predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity. In particular, they occur...
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