Latest Polar jet Stories

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 It would be a mistake to think of black holes as having a uniformity of size or mass. They range from modest objects formed from the end of an individual stars' life to behemoths billions of times more massive that rule the centers of galaxies. A new study recently published in the journal Science, however, shows that high-speed jets launched from active black holes share fundamental similarities despite the mass, age or...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected a jet of X-rays from a supermassive black hole 12.4 billion light years from Earth, making it the most distant X-ray jet ever observed. The jet gives astronomers a glimpse into the explosive activity associated with super massive black hole growth in the early universe. A quasar named GB 1428+4217, or GB 1428 for short, produced the jet of X-rays. The black holes at the center of most...

[ Watch the Video: High Speed Video Of Shock Diamond ] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A supersonic jet of material that looks amazingly similar to the afterburner flow of a fighter jet is blasting over two million light-years from the center of a distant galaxy. The big difference, however, is that the jet engine responsible for this material is a supermassive black hole and the material is moving at nearly the speed of light. A new study, published this past...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online An international team of astronomers was able to measure the radius of a black hole for the first time. Researchers measured the radius of a black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, which lies about 50 million light-years away from the Milky Way. M87 has a black hole 6 billion times more massive than the Sun, and the team was able to observe the glow of matter near the edge of the black hole, or the "event horizon," using radio...

[Watch Video] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers have identified an X-ray signal that followed an observation made last year of a quiescent black hole in a distant galaxy. The black hole discovered by the team last year was seen erupting after shredding and consuming a passing star. Astronomers then witnessed days following the observation a distinctive X-ray signal that comes from matter on the verge of falling into the black hole. This...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The Hubble Space Telescope has unleashed a new image of a geyser of hot gas flowing from a newborn star. In the new image, Herbig-Haro 110 is seen showing off a turbulent streamer of gas, streaking across the picture. "Resembling a Fourth of July skyrocket, Herbig-Haro 110 is a geyser of hot gas from a newborn star that splashes up against and ricochets from the dense core of a cloud of molecular hydrogen," NASA said....

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com New research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society indicates that black holes are able to change gears, similar to an engine. Black holes are able to swallow up matter, and return a lot of energy to the Universe in exchange for the mass they eat. When a black hole attracts mass, they trigger the release of intense X-ray radiation and power strong jets.  However, scientists have been baffled because not all black holes...

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...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope took this image of a baby star sprouting two identical jets (green lines emanating from fuzzy star). The jet on the right had been seen before in visible-light views, but the jet at left -- the identical twin to the first jet -- could only be seen in detail with Spitzer's infrared detectors. The left jet was hidden behind a dark cloud, which Spitzer can see through. The twin jets, in a system called Herbig-Haro 34, are made of identical knots of gas and dust,...