Latest Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Stories
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using NASA's Kepler space telescope have found that six percent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-like planets. Red dwarfs are considered to be the most abundant stars in our galaxy, so it is feasible that one of these Earth-like planets could be just 13 light-years away, when taking into account the astronomers new research published in The Astrophysical Journal. The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online An unusually dense cloud located near the center of the galaxy does not appear to be forming any massive stars, astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have discovered, and that behavior has them puzzled as it appears to defy the rules of star formation. The cloud, which the researchers have named G0.253+0.016, is located in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole three millions times as massive as the...
Building a terrestrial planet requires raw materials that weren't available in the early history of the universe. The Big Bang filled space with hydrogen and helium. Chemical elements like silicon and oxygen - key components of rocks - had to be cooked up over time by stars. But how long did that take? How many of such heavy elements do you need to form planets? Previous studies have shown that Jupiter-sized gas giants tend to form around stars containing more heavy elements than the Sun....
New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how supermassive black holes grow in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers long have thought that a supermassive black hole and the bulge of stars at the center of its host galaxy grow at the same rate -- the bigger the bulge, the bigger the black hole. A new study of Chandra data has revealed two nearby galaxies whose supermassive black holes are growing faster than the galaxies themselves. The mass of a...
WASHINGTON, June 11, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory challenges prevailing ideas about how black holes grow in the centers of galaxies. Astronomers long have thought that a supermassive black hole and the bulge of stars at the center of its host galaxy grow at the same rate -- the bigger the bulge, the bigger the black hole. However, a new study of Chandra data has revealed two nearby galaxies with supermassive black holes that are...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that a black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at several million miles per hour. The finding could mean that there are many giant black holes that are roaming around undetected out in the vast spaces between galaxies. "It's hard to believe that a supermassive black hole weighing millions of times the mass of the sun could be moved at all, let alone kicked out of a galaxy at enormous...
WASHINGTON, June 4, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers have found strong evidence that a massive black hole is being ejected from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory suggest that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from gravitational wave radiation. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "It's hard to believe that...
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...
New research suggests that billions of stars in our galaxy have captured rogue planets that once roamed interstellar space. The nomad worlds, which were kicked out of the star systems in which they formed, occasionally find a new home with a different sun. This finding could explain the existence of some planets that orbit surprisingly far from their stars, and even the existence of a double-planet system. "Stars trade planets just like baseball teams trade players," said Hagai Perets of...
An international team of scientists have discovered an ‘ordinary’ black hole in the 12 million light year-distant galaxy Centaurus A. This is the first time that a normal-size black hole has been detected away from the immediate vicinity of our own Galaxy. PhD student Mark Burke will present the discovery at the National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester. Although exotic by everyday standards, black holes are everywhere. The lowest-mass black holes are formed when very massive stars...
