Latest Blazar 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 The source of a gamma ray flare that shot past Earth throughout much of 2011 has been discovered, and contrary to popular theory, they did not occur close to their galaxy’s central black hole, NASA officials announced on Monday. Using data collected by both the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), astronomers at the U.S. space agency have discovered that the...

WASHINGTON, Jan. 7, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In 2011, a months-long blast of energy launched by an enormous black hole almost 11 billion years ago swept past Earth. Using a combination of data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the world's largest radio telescope, astronomers have zeroed in on the source of this ancient outburst. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO)...

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...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers using data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have made the most accurate measurement of starlight in the universe and used it to establish the total amount of light from all of the stars that have ever shone, accomplishing a primary mission goal. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO ) "The optical and ultraviolet light from stars continues to travel throughout the universe even after...

[ Watch the Video: NASA's Fermi Explores the Early Universe ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have made the most accurate measurement of starlight in the universe and have used this to establish the total amount of light from all of the stars that have ever shone. A team used data from NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope to find the total sum of starlight in the universe, or the extragalactic background light (EBL). Gamma rays are the most...

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...

WASHINGTON, April 12, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers are actively hunting a class of supermassive black holes throughout the universe called blazars thanks to data collected by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The mission has revealed more than 200 blazars and has the potential to find thousands more. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Blazars are among the most energetic objects in the universe. They consist of supermassive...

[ Watch the Video ] NASA's Fermi team recently released the second catalog of gamma-ray sources detected by their satellite's Large Area Telescope (LAT). Of the 1873 sources found, nearly 600 are complete mysteries. No one knows what they are. "Fermi sees gamma rays coming from directions in the sky where there are no obvious objects likely to produce gamma rays," says David Thompson, Fermi Deputy Project Scientist from Goddard Space Flight Center. Gamma rays are by their very nature...

When two galaxies merge to form a giant, the central supermassive black hole in the new galaxy develops an insatiable appetite. However, this ferocious appetite is unsustainable. For the first time, observations with the Gemini Observatory clearly reveal an extreme, large-scale galactic outflow that brings the cosmic dinner to a halt. The outflow is effectively blowing the galaxy apart in a negative feedback loop, depriving the galaxy's monstrous black hole of the gas and dust it needs to...