Latest Stellar black hole Stories

Combining observations made with ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. This object, also known as a microquasar, blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years across, twice as large and tens of times more powerful than other known microquasars. The discovery is reported this week in the journal Nature."We have been astonished by how much energy is injected into the gas by...

New evidence from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton strengthens the case that two mid-sized black holes exist close to the center of a nearby starburst galaxy. These "survivor" black holes avoided falling into the center of the galaxy and could be examples of the seeds required for the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxies, including the one in the Milky Way.For several decades, scientists have had strong evidence for two distinct classes of black hole:...

Astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have detected, in another galaxy, a stellar-mass black hole much farther away than any other previously known. With a mass above fifteen times that of the Sun, this is also the second most massive stellar-mass black hole ever found. It is entwined with a star that will soon become a black hole itself.The stellar-mass black holes [1] found in the Milky Way weigh up to ten times the mass of the Sun and are certainly not be taken lightly, but, outside...

GREENBELT, Md., Nov. 10 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with intermediate masses has been much harder to come by. Now, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) "Intermediate-mass...

While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with intermediate masses has been much harder to come by. Now, astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date."Intermediate-mass black holes contain between 100 and 10,000 times the sun's mass," explained Tod Strohmayer, an...

An international team of astronomers using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory says it's discovered a new kind of black hole. The scientists, led by Sean Farrell of the University of Leicester, England, said the newly found black hole weighs more than 500 solar masses and is a missing link between lighter stellar-mass and heavier super-massive black holes. Stellar-mass black holes about 3 to 20 times as massive as the sun, and super-massive black holes several million to...

Scientists have discovered a new class of black hole that stands at a mass of more than 500 times that of the Sun.An international team of astronomers detailed the new discovery found in a galaxy some 290 million light years from Earth in the journal Nature.The team used the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory to find HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1) that could stand as the "missing link" between supermassive black holes "“ several million to several billion times the...

New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made a major advance in explaining how a special class of black holes may shut off the high-speed jets they produce. These results suggest that these black holes have a mechanism for regulating the rate at which they grow.Black holes come in many sizes: the supermassive ones, including those in quasars, which weigh in at millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, and the much smaller stellar-mass black holes which have measured...

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...

A dramatic new Chandra image of the nearby galaxy Centaurus A provides one of the best views to date of the effects of an active supermassive black hole. Opposing jets of high-energy particles can be seen extending to the outer reaches of the galaxy, and numerous smaller black holes in binary star systems are also visible.The image was made from an ultra-deep look at the galaxy Centaurus A, equivalent to more than seven days of continuous observations. Centaurus A is the nearest galaxy to...