Latest Centaurus A Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online While most elliptical galaxies are considered vintage, retired star making neighborhoods, astronomers have found one that has a personality more like that of a pinwheel-shaped spiral galaxy. Centaurus A isn't considered to be a typical elliptical galaxy to begin with. It is known for its dark dust lane across its middle, which is a sign that it swallowed up a spiral galaxy about 300 million years ago. "No other elliptical galaxy...

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers have found an extraordinary galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the universe, that is breaking several important cosmic records. Observations of the Phoenix cluster with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope, and eight other world-class observatories may force astronomers to rethink how these colossal structures and the galaxies that inhabit them evolve....

A new image of the center of the distinctive galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the new telescope, which is still under construction, allows astronomers to see with unprecedented quality through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy's center. Centaurus A is a massive elliptical radio galaxy (a galaxy that emits strong radio waves) and is the most prominent, as well as the nearest, radio galaxy in the sky. Its very...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] The strange galaxy Centaurus A is pictured in a new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). With a total exposure time of more than 50 hours this is probably the deepest view of this peculiar and spectacular object ever created. The image was produced by the Wide Field Imager of the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Centaurus A, also known as NGC 5128 [1], is a peculiar massive elliptical galaxy with a...

Astronomers have found that a number of stars that form during the early lives of galaxies may be influenced by the massive black holes in the center of the celestial suburb. The team, using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, looked a distant galaxies that were far enough away that the light reaching Herschel is from billions of years ago. "Herschel provides a new perspective and is conducting a number of surveys of galaxies near and far, in order to unravel...

The Spitzer Space Telescope has helped astronomers reveal that the Sombrero galaxy is both a rotund and a slender disk galaxy. Sombrero is a round elliptical galaxy with a thin disk embedded inside, and is one of the first known to exhibit characteristics of two different types of galaxies. "The Sombrero is more complex than previously thought," Dimitri Gadotti of the European Southern Observatory in Chile, said in a press release. "The only way to understand all we know about this...

Observations by two of the European Space Agency's space observatories have provided a multi-wavelength view of the mysterious galaxy Centaurus A. The elliptical galaxy Centaurus A at visible, far-infrared and x-ray wavelengths. In visible light the galaxy appears as a ball of stars, with a thick lane of dust running across it. The far-infrared light shows the glow from jets of material emanating from near the black hole in the galaxy’s core. Also visible is a twisted disc of dust, the...

Supernova explosions and the jets of a monstrous black hole are scattering a galaxy's star-making gas like a cosmic leaf blower, a new study finds. The findings, which relied on ultraviolet observations from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer and a host of other instruments, fill an important gap in the current understanding of galactic evolution. It has long been known that gas-rich spiral galaxies like our Milky Way smash together to create elliptical galaxies such as the one observed in...

An international team of scientists have discovered an ‘ordinary’ black hole in the 12 million light year-distant galaxy Centaurus A. This is the first time that a normal-size black hole has been detected away from the immediate vicinity of our own Galaxy. PhD student Mark Burke will present the discovery at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester. Although exotic by everyday standards, black holes are everywhere. The lowest-mass black holes are formed when very massive stars...

Astronomers say they have found a black hole that was once at the core of a now-disintegrated dwarf galaxy. The researchers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to find a cluster of young, blue stars encircling the first intermediate-mass black hole ever discovered. "For the first time, we have evidence on the environment, and thus the origin, of this middle-weight black hole," Mathieu Servility, who worked at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics when this research was...