Latest Galactic Center Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using a telescope at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan have discovered a molecular cloud that has a peculiar helical structure. The team, led by Shinji Matsumura, a second year Ph. D. candidate, named it a "pigtail" molecular cloud due to its morphology. The pigtail molecular cloud is located in the galactic center, about 30,000 light years away from the solar system. Giant molecular clouds found in this...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Researchers from a Japanese university have discovered intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) candidates at the center of the Milky Way, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAO) announced on Friday. Tomoharu Oka, an Associate Professor at Keio University, and colleagues used radio telescopes to locate four black hole candidates approximately 30,000 light-years from the solar system, located in the direction of the...

Lee Rannals for RedOrbit.com Gamma-ray beams seen in the Milky Way's central black hole suggest that the galaxy's center was much more active in the past, according to new research. Harvard University astrophysicists used an image taken by NASA's Fermi space telescope to reveal gamma-rays from the Milky Way millions of years ago. "These faint jets are a ghost or after-image of what existed a million years ago," Meng Su, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...

By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, a method that has yielded an unprecedented amount of data for such observations. The resolution at which they were able to observe this highly luminescent active galactic nucleus (AGN) has given them direct confirmation of how mass accretes onto black holes in centers of...

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...

A team of volunteers has pored over observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and discovered more than 5,000 "bubbles" in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy. Young, hot stars blow these bubbles into surrounding gas and dust, indicating areas of brand new star formation. Upwards of 35,000 "citizen scientists" sifted through the Spitzer infrared data as part of the online Milky Way Project to find these telltale bubbles. The volunteers have turned up 10 times as many bubbles as previous...

ESA’s Planck mission has revealed that our Galaxy contains previously undiscovered islands of cold gas and a mysterious haze of microwaves. These results give scientists new treasure to mine and take them closer to revealing the blueprint of cosmic structure. The new results are being presented this week at an international conference in Bologna, Italy, where astronomers from around the world are discussing the mission’s intermediate results. These results include the first map of...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] | [ Video 3 ] | The massive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is destined to be invaded by a gas cloud, creating a violent encounter, according to astronomers. The supermassive black hole in the Milky Way is close enough for astronomers to study in detail, so the encounter could provide a unique chance for scientist to observe what until now has only been theorized. The astronomers plan to find out how a black hole eats up gas, dust and stars...

Two UK astronomers have found that the giant black holes in the center of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the Universe. Dr Alejo Martinez-Sansigre of the University of Portsmouth and Prof. Steve Rawlings of the University of Oxford made the new discovery by using radio, optical and X-ray data. They publish their findings in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.There is strong evidence that every galaxy has a black hole in its...