Latest Supermassive black holes Stories
Astronomers have found a black hole where few thought they could ever exist, inside a globular star cluster. The finding has broad implications for the dynamics of stars clusters and also for the existence of a still-speculative new class of black holes called 'intermediate-mass' black holes. The discovery is reported in the current issue of Nature. Tom Maccarone of the University of Southampton in England leads an international team on the finding, made primarily with the European Space...
This is a new composite image of galaxy cluster MS0735.6+7421, located about 2.6 billion light-years away in the constellation Camelopardus. The three views of the region were taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in Feb. 2006, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in Nov. 2003, and NRAO's Very Large Array in Oct. 2004. The Hubble image shows dozens of galaxies bound together by gravity. In Jan. 2005, astronomers reported that a supermassive black hole, lurking in the central bright galaxy,...
Supermassive black holes in some giant galaxies create such a hostile environment, they shut down the formation of new stars, according to NASA Galaxy Evolution Explorer findings published in the August 24 issue of Nature. The orbiting observatory surveyed more than 800 nearby elliptical galaxies of various sizes. An intriguing pattern emerged: the more massive, or bigger, the galaxy, the less likely it was to have young stars. Because bigger galaxies are known to have bigger black holes,...
Cambridge, MA - In the distant, young universe, quasars shine with a brilliance unmatched by anything in the local cosmos. Although they appear starlike in optical telescopes, quasars are actually the bright centers of galaxies located billions of light-years from Earth. The seething core of a quasar currently is pictured as containing a disk of hot gas spiraling into a supermassive black hole. Some of that gas is forcefully ejected outward in two opposing jets at nearly the speed of light....
Shoes may not come in every color, but space objects do. All objects in space, everything from dust to distant galaxies, give off a rainbow of light - including light our eyes can't see. That's where NASA's Great Observatories come in. Together, they help astronomers see all the shades of the cosmos.A new false-colored image from NASA's Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer space telescopes demonstrates this principle beautifully. The multi-hued portrait shows a giant jet of particles that has been...
Simulations forecast favorable conditions for verifying Einstein predictions A wispy collection of atoms and molecules fuels the vast cosmic maelstroms produced by colliding galaxies and merging supermassive black holes, according to some of the most advanced supercomputer simulations ever conducted on this topic. "We found that gas is essential in driving the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes," said Stelios Kazantzidis, a Fellow in the University of Chicago's...
By Deborah Zabarenko WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Black holes turn out to be "green." These monstrous matter-sucking drains in space are the most fuel-efficient engines in the universe, researchers said on Monday. Just how efficient? If a car could use this kind of engine, it could theoretically go about a billion miles (1.6 billion km) on a gallon of gas, said Steve Allen of Stanford University in California. Unfortunately, no earthly car could do this, as black holes are fueled by matter...
By Deborah ZabarenkoWASHINGTON (Reuters) - Black holes turn out to be "green."These monstrous matter-sucking drains in space are the most fuel-efficient engines in the universe, researchers said on Monday.Just how efficient? If a car could use this kind of engine, it could theoretically go about a billion miles (1.6 billion km) on a gallon of gas, said Steve Allen of Stanford University in California.Unfortunately, no earthly car could do this, as black holes are fueled by matter...
By Deborah ZabarenkoWASHINGTONÂ - Black holes turn out to be "green."These monstrous matter-sucking drains in space are the most fuel-efficient engines in the universe, researchers said on Monday.Just how efficient? If a car could use this kind of engine, it could theoretically go about a billion miles (1.6 billion km) on a gallon of gas, said Steve Allen of Stanford University in California.Unfortunately, no earthly car could do this, as black holes are fueled by matter lured by...
A pair of supermassive black holes in the distant universe are intertwined and spiraling toward a merger that will create a single super-supermassive black hole capable of swallowing billions of stars, according to a new study by astronomers at the University of Virginia, Bonn University and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The study appears in the April 6, 2006 issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. Black holes are among the oldest regions of the universe and hold clues to...
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...
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