Latest Supermassive black hole Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Listen to the podcast “How Planets Form” with redOrbit's Dr. John Millis and planet-hunting expert Dr. Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester. The center of the Milky Way seems like the last place to form a new planet, inhospitable and violent even. Stars crowd each other, whizzing through space like cars on a rush hour freeway while supernova explosions blast out shock waves and bathe the region in intense radiation. The...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Millions of black holes have been discovered, as well as extreme galaxies called hot DOGs using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The telescope has helped reveal millions of dusty black hole candidates throughout the universe, and about 1,000 dustier objects that are thought to be the brightest galaxies ever found called dust-obscured galaxies, or hot DOGs. "WISE has exposed a menagerie of hidden objects,"...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Fueled by an intense burst of star formation, fierce galactic winds may blow gas right out of massive galaxies, which in turn could shut down their ability to make new stars. A team of astronomers sifted through images and data from three telescopes to find 29 objects with outflowing winds measuring up to 2,500 kilometers per second, an order of magnitude faster than most observed galactic winds. "They're nearly blowing themselves...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers now believe the "monster stars" located in the nearby galaxy the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) were formed through the merger of lighter stars. The team wrote in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the group of stars may have formed while smaller stars were in a tight binary system. In 2010, scientists discovered these supermassive stars, one of which is more than 300 times the mass of the...
[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...
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 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...
By combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes, an international research team has observed the active accretion phase of a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away, a method that has yielded an unprecedented amount of data for such observations. The resolution at which they were able to observe this highly luminescent active galactic nucleus (AGN) has given them direct confirmation of how mass accretes onto black holes in centers of...
[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] The strange galaxy Centaurus A is pictured in a new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). With a total exposure time of more than 50 hours this is probably the deepest view of this peculiar and spectacular object ever created. The image was produced by the Wide Field Imager of the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. Centaurus A, also known as NGC 5128 [1], is a peculiar massive elliptical galaxy with a...
Astronomers have found that a number of stars that form during the early lives of galaxies may be influenced by the massive black holes in the center of the celestial suburb. The team, using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory, looked a distant galaxies that were far enough away that the light reaching Herschel is from billions of years ago. "Herschel provides a new perspective and is conducting a number of surveys of galaxies near and far, in order to unravel...
Latest Supermassive black hole Reference Libraries
Microquasar -- Microquasars are smaller cousins of quasars. They are named after quasars, as they have some common characteristics: strong and variable radio emission often seen as radio jets, and an accretion disk surrounding a black hole. In quasars, the black hole is supermassive (millions of solar masses) as in microquasars, the black hole mass is a few solar masses. In microquasars, the accreted mass comes from a normal star and the accretion disk is very luminous in optical regions...
Black Hole -- Black holes are objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravity. They are believed to form from the gravitational collapse of astronomical objects containing two or more solar masses. Astronomical observations suggest that the center of most galaxies, including our own Milky Way, contain supermassive black holes containing millions to billions of solar masses. Black holes are predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity. In particular, they occur...
