Latest Ultraluminous X-ray source Stories

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...

ESA's XMM-Newton has helped to find evidence for the existence of controversial Intermediate Mass Black Holes. Scientists used a new, recently proven method for determining the mass of black holes.Nikolai Shaposhnikov and Lev Titarchuk, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), have used the technique to determine the mass of the black hole, Cygnus X-1, located in the constellation Cygnus (the Swan) approximately 10 000 light years away in our Galaxy, the Milky Way. The elegant technique,...

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...

NASA -- Peculiar outbursts of X-rays coming from a black hole have provided evidence that it has a mass of about 10,000 Suns, which would place it in a possible new class of black holes. The timing and regularity of these outbursts, observed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, make the object one of the best candidates yet for a so-called intermediate-mass black hole.Scientists have strong evidence for the existence of stellar black holes that are about 10 times as massive as the Sun. They...