Latest Supermassive black holes Stories
Activity from a supermassive black hole is responsible for the intriguing appearance of this galaxy, 3C305, located about 600 million light years away from Earth. The structures in red and light blue are X-ray and optical images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope respectively. The optical data is from oxygen emission only, and therefore the full extent of the galaxy is not seen. Radio data are shown in darker blue and are from the National Science Foundation's...
Two enormous black holes appear to be orbiting one another at the center of a faraway galaxy, formed by the collision of two separate galaxies, astronomers from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson reported Wednesday.The two supermassive black holes are locked in orbit about 5 billion light years away from Earth, the scientists said. One light year is the distance light travels in a year, approximately 6 trillion miles.Data from Apache Point Observatory in New...
A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf...
A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf...
Variations in the brightness of the Q0957+561 quasar, also known as the "twin quasar" due to its duplicated image on Earth, are intrinsic to the entity itself and not caused by the gravitational effects of possible planets or stars from a far away galaxy. This is the conclusion of a study carried out by Spanish researchers resolving a mystery that has intrigued astronomers for the past 30 years.The quasar Q0957+561, some 9 billion light years away in the Ursa Major constellation, was...
Thanks to the Very Large Telescope's acute and powerful near-infrared eye, astronomers have uncovered a host of new young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries in nearby galaxy NGC 253. The centre of this galaxy appears to harbor a twin of our own Milky Way's supermassive black hole. Astronomers from the Instituto de AstrofÃsica de Canarias (Spain) used NACO, a sharp-eyed adaptive optics instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), to study the fine detail in NGC 253, one of the...
Seeing the shape of material around black holes for first timeBlack holes can now be thought of as donut holes. The shape of material around black holes has been seen for the first time: an analysis of over 200 active galactic nuclei"”cores of galaxies powered by disks of hot material feeding a super-massive black hole"”shows that all have a consistent, ordered physical structure that seems to be independent of the black hole's size."This should be a very messy and complicated...
In a 16-year long study, using several of ESO's flagship telescopes, a team of German astronomers has produced the most detailed view ever of the surroundings of the monster lurking at our Galaxy's heart "” a supermassive black hole. The research has unraveled the hidden secrets of this tumultuous region by mapping the orbits of almost 30 stars, a five-fold increase over previous studies. One of the stars has now completed a full orbit around the black hole.By watching the motions of 28...
This composite image shows M84, a massive elliptical galaxy in the Virgo Cluster, about 55 million light years from Earth. Hot gas around M84 is shown in a Chandra X-ray Observatory image in blue and a radio image from the Very Large Array is shown in red. A background image from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is shown in yellow and white.A number of bubbles are visible in the hot gas, outlined with blue X-ray emission. These bubbles were blown by relativistic particles generated by the central...
The powerful black holes at the center of massive galaxies and galaxy clusters act as hearts to the systems, pumping energy out at regular intervals to regulate the growth of the black holes themselves, as well as star formation, according to new data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory.Scientists from the University of Michigan, the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for...
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...
