Latest Galaxies Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel spacecraft has revealed that the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy is about to get a taste of some hot molecular gas. Sagittarius A has a mass of about four million times that of our Sun and sits about 26,000 light-years away from us. It is a few hundred times closer to us than any other galaxy with an active black hole at its center, making it ideal for studying these...

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....

Watch the video "Black Hole Eats Super-Jupiter" Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Integral space observatory have watched as a black hole woke up to feed on a low-mass object that strayed just a little too close. The team was using the Integral observatory to study a galaxy 47 million light-years away when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location. "The observation was completely unexpected,...

[ Listen to the three-part interview with Prof. Holley-Bockelmann in RedOrbit’s Your Universe Today Podcasts ] John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As astronomers peer out into the distant reaches of the Universe they find that some galaxies are emitting enormous amounts of radiation from their cores. Supermassive black holes at the center of these galaxies consume the surrounding gas and dust, heat it up, and thrust it into outer space at nearly the speed...

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...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online On large astronomical scales, gravity remains the dominant force acting on heavenly bodies, from asteroids and exoplanets to solar systems and supermassive black holes. But when it comes to young stars in clustered galaxies, researchers have found that the dynamics of these crowded environments cannot be fully accounted for by simple understanding of gravity. A new study, led by the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A rare explosion from a rotating star may have created the most recent black hole formed in the Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory claim that matter was ejected at high speeds along the poles of a rotating star, creating a supernova remnant, W49B, which may contain a young black hole. "W49B is the first of its kind to be discovered in the galaxy," said Laura Lopez, who led the study at the...

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...