Latest Bulge Stories

Watch the videos "Panning Across Messier 77" and "Zooming in on Messier 77" Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A stunning new image of the spiral galaxy Messier 77 captured by the Hubble Space Telescope was released today. The image of one of the most famous and well-studied galaxies features patches of red throughout the photo, which highlights the pockets of star formation along its arms. Messier 77, or NGC 1068, sits in the constellation Cetus about 45 million...

New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how supermassive black holes grow in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers long have thought that a supermassive black hole and the bulge of stars at the center of its host galaxy grow at the same rate -- the bigger the bulge, the bigger the black hole. A new study of Chandra data has revealed two nearby galaxies whose supermassive black holes are growing faster than the galaxies themselves. The mass of a...

WASHINGTON, June 11, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how black holes grow in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers long have thought that a supermassive black hole and the bulge of stars at the center of its host galaxy grow at the same rate -- the bigger the bulge, the bigger the black hole. However, a new study of Chandra data has revealed two nearby galaxies with supermassive black holes that are...

Visible in the constellation of Andromeda, NGC 891 is located approximately 30 million light-years away from Earth. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope turned its powerful wide field Advanced Camera for Surveys towards this spiral galaxy and took this close-up of its northern half. The galaxy's central bulge is just out of the image on the bottom left. The galaxy, spanning some 100,000 light-years, is seen exactly edge-on, and reveals its thick plane of dust and interstellar gas. While...

A curious correlation between the mass of a galaxy's central black hole and the velocity of stars in a vast, roughly spherical structure known as its bulge has puzzled astronomers for years. An international team led by Francesco Tombesi at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., now has identified a new type of black-hole-driven outflow that appears to be both powerful enough and common enough to explain this link. Most big galaxies contain a central black hole weighing...

  Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon. The black holes are located near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago. "If this galaxy...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The black holes are located near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes are...

  Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz have used a supercomputer to create a spiral galaxy that matches our own Milky Way galaxy. The computer simulation is part of a physics project involving galaxy formation and evolution. "Previous efforts to form a massive disk galaxy like the Milky Way had failed, because the simulated galaxies ended up with huge central bulges compared to the size of the disk," Javiera Guedes, a graduate student in astronomy and astrophysics...

  For almost 20 years astrophysicists have been trying to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way realistically. Now astrophysicists from the University of Zurich present the world's first realistic simulation of the formation of our home galaxy together with astronomers from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The new results were partly calculated on the computer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and show, for instance, that there has to...

An assorted mix of colorful galaxies was released May 25 by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, or WISE. The nine galaxies are a taste of what's to come. The mission plans to release similar images for the 1,000 largest galaxies that appear in our sky, and possibly more."Galaxies come in all sorts of delicious flavors," said Tom Jarrett, a WISE team member at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena, who...