Latest Relativistic 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...

According to new research, the flash from one of the biggest and brightest bangs ever recorded by astronomers is derived from a massive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. The researchers found that the black hole appears to have ripped apart a star that wandered too close, which helped create a powerful beam of energy that crossed the 3.8 billion lights years to Earth. The astronomers reported in the journal Science in a paper entitled "An Extremely Luminous Panchromatic...

WASHINGTON, May 20, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere, has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves,"...

An international team, including NASA-funded researchers, using radio telescopes located throughout the Southern Hemisphere has produced the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a supermassive black hole in a nearby galaxy."These jets arise as infalling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves," said Cornelia Mueller, the study's lead author and a doctoral student at the University of...

Scientists have found evidence that a giant black hole has been jerked around twice, causing its spin axis to point in a different direction from before. This discovery, made with new data from NASA's Chandra X- ray Observatory, might explain several mysterious-looking objects found throughout the Universe.The axis of the spinning black hole is thought to have moved, but not the black hole itself, so this result differs from recently published work on recoiling black holes."We think this...

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a cosmic "ghost" lurking around a distant supermassive black hole. This is the first detection of such a high-energy apparition, and scientists think it is evidence of a huge eruption produced by the black hole.This discovery presents astronomers with a valuable opportunity to observe phenomena that occurred when the Universe was very young. The X-ray ghost, so-called because a diffuse X-ray source has remained after other radiation from...

A survey by the Chandra X-ray observatory has revealed in detail, for the first time, the effects of a shock wave blasted through a galaxy by powerful jets of plasma emanating from a supermassive black hole at the galactic core. The observations of Centaurus A, the nearest galaxy that contains these jets, have enabled astronomers to revise dramatically their picture of how jets affect the galaxies in which they live. The results will be presented on Wednesday 22nd April at the European Week...

A flare-up in a jet of matter blasting from a monster black hole is giving astronomers an incredible light show.The outburst is coming from a blob of matter, called HST-1, embedded in the jet, a powerful narrow beam of hot gas produced by a supermassive black hole residing in the core of the giant elliptical galaxy M87. HST-1 is so bright that it is outshining even M87's brilliant core, whose monster black hole is one of the most massive yet discovered.The glowing gas clump has taken...

Astronomers have a new insight into the active galaxy Centaurus A (NGC 5128), as the jets and lobes emanating from the central black hole have been imaged at submillimeter wavelengths for the first time. The new data, from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile, which is operated by ESO, have been combined with visible and X-ray wavelengths to produce this striking new image. Centaurus A is our nearest giant galaxy, at a distance of about 13 million light-years in the...

A team of scientists, including researchers in the University of Southampton's School of Physics and Astronomy, has shown that black holes are not the only known objects in the universe to produce infrared light from beams of particles being shot into space at nearly the speed of light.Previously, these steady "˜relativistic jets' were only seen from black holes which form part of a black hole X-ray binary, a system containing a black hole orbited by a normal star which is so close that the...