Andromeda Galaxy Is Full Of Holes, Black Holes That Is
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have discovered an unprecedented number of black holes in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), one of the Milky Way’s nearest cosmic neighbors, using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray...
Latest Supermassive black holes Stories
WASHINGTON, June 12, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have discovered an unprecedented bonanza of black holes in the Andromeda Galaxy, one of the nearest galaxies to the Milky Way. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) Using more than 150 Chandra observations, spread over 13 years, researchers identified 26 black hole candidates, the largest number to date, in a galaxy outside our own. Many consider...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel spacecraft has revealed that the supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy is about to get a taste of some hot molecular gas. Sagittarius A has a mass of about four million times that of our Sun and sits about 26,000 light-years away from us. It is a few hundred times closer to us than any other galaxy with an active black hole at its center, making it ideal for studying these...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The entire Milky Way galaxy revolves around a supermassive black hole, which is surrounded by a turbulent expanse of space fraught with extreme gravitational forces. Despite the inhospitable nature of this region, a team of American astronomers has found jets of material that typically indicate star formation when found in less tumultuous sections of the universe, according to their report in the Astrophysical Journal Letters....
Watch the video "Black Hole Eats Super-Jupiter" Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers using the European Space Agency's (ESA) Integral space observatory have watched as a black hole woke up to feed on a low-mass object that strayed just a little too close. The team was using the Integral observatory to study a galaxy 47 million light-years away when they noticed a bright X-ray flare coming from another location. "The observation was completely unexpected,...
Royal Astronomical Society For only the second time in history, a team of scientists including Michele Fumagalli from the Carnegie Institution for Science in the United States have discovered an extremely rare triple quasar system. Their work is published in the Oxford University Press journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Quasars are extremely bright and powerful sources of energy that sit in the center of a galaxy, surrounding a black hole. In systems with...
[ Listen to the three-part interview with Prof. Holley-Bockelmann in RedOrbit’s Your Universe Today Podcasts ] John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online As astronomers peer out into the distant reaches of the Universe they find that some galaxies are emitting enormous amounts of radiation from their cores. Supermassive black holes at the center of these galaxies consume the surrounding gas and dust, heat it up, and thrust it into outer space at nearly the speed...
John P. Millis, PhD for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online One of the challenges of studying black holes – incredibly dense stellar remnants arising from massive supernova explosions – is that it is extremely difficult to measure the spin of such objects. And it is this motion that is of particular interest, since Einstein’s theory of General Relativity predicts that the gravitational waves produced from their rotation can distort the very fabric of space-time around these massive...
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 On large astronomical scales, gravity remains the dominant force acting on heavenly bodies, from asteroids and exoplanets to solar systems and supermassive black holes. But when it comes to young stars in clustered galaxies, researchers have found that the dynamics of these crowded environments cannot be fully accounted for by simple understanding of gravity. A new study, led by the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics...
John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Click here to stream the “Supermassive Black Holes” podcast (Or right-click on the above link to download the file to your computer) Only a couple decades ago, the mere idea of supermassive black holes – those that are millions or billions of times more massive than our sun – seemed unthinkable to most astronomers. Now, however, we believe that these enormous objects lie at the center of nearly every galaxy in the...
Latest Supermassive black holes Reference Libraries
Supermassive Black Hole -- A Supermassive black hole is a black hole with a mass in the range of millions or billions solar masses. A supermassive black hole has some interesting properties differing from his low-mass cousins: -- The average density of a supermassive black hole can be very low, and actually can be lower than water's density. This happens because the black hole diameter increases linearly with mass, and consequently density drops much faster. -- Strong tidal...
Seyfert Galaxy -- Seyfert galaxies are spiral or irregular galaxies containing an extremely bright nucleus, most likely caused by a supermassive black hole, that can sometimes outshine the surrounding galaxy. The light from the central nucleus varies in less than a year, which implies that the emitting region must be less than one light year across. They are named for the astronomer Carl Seyfert, who studied them extensively in the 1940s. They are a subclass of active galactic nuclei....
Quasar -- A quasar (from quasi-stellar radio source) is an astronomical object that looks like a star in optical telescopes (i.e. it is a point source), but has a very high redshift. The general consensus is that this high redshift is cosmological, the result of Hubble's law and that their redshift indicates that they are typically very distant from Earth; we observe them as they were several billions of years ago. Since we can see them despite their distance, they must emit more...
![NASA\](/media/gallery/chandra-x-ray-observatory/thumbs/thumbs_m31.jpg "NASA\")
