Latest Galaxies Stories

How do you weigh the biggest black holes in the universe? One answer now comes from a completely new and independent technique that astronomers have developed using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.By measuring a peak in the temperature of hot gas in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4649, scientists have determined the mass of the galaxy's supermassive black hole. The method, applied for the first time, gives results that are consistent with a traditional...

The biggest black holes may feed just like the smallest ones, according to data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ground-based telescopes. This discovery supports the implication of Einstein's relativity theory that black holes of all sizes have similar properties, and will be useful for predicting the properties of a conjectured new class of black holes.The conclusion comes from a large observing campaign of the spiral galaxy M81, which is about 12 million light years from Earth. In...

An ambitious study of active and inactive galaxies has given new insights into the complex interaction between super-massive black holes at the heart of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and star formation in the surrounding galaxy.  Results will be presented in a talk by Paul Westoby on Friday 4th April at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in Belfast. Along with colleagues, Carole Mundell and Ivan Baldry from the Astrophysics Research Institute of Liverpool John Moores University, Westoby...

AUSTIN, Texas — A half-dozen hefty black holes hide out where they are least expected, in relatively skinny galaxies. The discovery implies galaxies don't need bulging bellies to harbor monstrous black holes. Until now, astronomers had thought central concentrations of stars called galactic bulges were required for black holes to grow. Our own Milky Way, like most spiral galaxies, has such a bulge. In many large galaxies, the bulge feeds binge eating by the black hole,...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected plump black holes where least expected -- skinny galaxies. Like people, galaxies come in different shapes and sizes. There are thin spirals both with and without central bulges of stars, and more rotund ellipticals that are themselves like giant bulges. Scientists have long held that all galaxies except the slender, bulgeless spirals harbor supermassive black holes at their cores. Furthermore, bulges were thought to be required for black holes to...

AUSTIN, Texas -- We all start to party less around middle age, and new studies by a team led by University of Texas at Austin astronomer Shardha Jogee now finds that the universe, as a whole, is no exception. Jogee discussed her results today at a news conference at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.According to the current models of galaxy formation, dubbed "hierarchical lambda cold dark matter" models, galaxies built up to their current masses, shapes, and sizes...

Four galaxies are slamming into each other and kicking up billions of stars in one of the largest cosmic smash-ups ever observed. The clashing galaxies, spotted by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will eventually merge into a single, behemoth galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. This rare sighting provides an unprecedented look at how the most massive galaxies in the universe form. "Most of the galaxy mergers we already knew about are like compact cars crashing...

Picture the Milky Way galaxy -- a disk of stars and gas, a stellar spheroid and an enormous halo of dark matter. It spirals around a black hole that is supermassive-about three million solar masses. The Milky Way's total mass is about 100 billion solar masses-enormous to us but average among galaxies.Then imagine that galaxy encountering its identical twin. The first galaxy merges with the second to produce a galaxy that's even grander and greater. Cosmologists think that's how galaxies...

Cambridge, MA -- Astronomers are hunting an elusive target: rogue black holes that have been ejected from the centers of their home galaxies. Some doubted that the quarry could be spotted, since a black hole must be gobbling matter from an accretion disk in order for that matter to shine. And if a black hole is ripped from the core of its home galaxy and sent hurling into the outskirts, the thinking goes, then its accretion disk might be left behind. New calculations by theorist Avi Loeb...

Cambridge, MA -- New research shows that black holes are not the ultimate destroyers that are often portrayed in popular culture. Instead, warm gas escaping from the clutches of enormous black holes could be one source of the chemical elements that make life possible. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe contained only hydrogen and helium. Heavier chemical elements had to be cooked up inside the first stars, then scattered throughout space to be incorporated in next-generation stars...