Latest XMM-Newton Stories

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Astronomers using ground and space telescopes around the world have revealed a black hole and a star, intertwined in a cosmic tango together. Astronomers writing in Astronomy & Astrophysics say they have observed a black hole, known as MAXI J1659-152, and a red dwarf with a mass only 20 percent that of the Sun orbiting each other every 2.4 hours. The two cosmic bodies sit over half a million miles away from each other, but are...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 27, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two X-ray space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our sun. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The supermassive black hole lies at the dust and gas-filled heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365, and it is...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- NASA will host a news teleconference at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Feb. 27, to announce black hole observations from its newest X-ray telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20081007/38461LOGO) The briefing participants are: -- Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator, California Institute of Technology,...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online While solar wind is a common occurrence in our Solar System, a study of a new, more fierce wind has been completed using the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton space observatory. These massive stellar winds derive from rare, giant stars which burn their nuclear fuel more rapidly than stars like the Sun, and that live for millions of years before exploding into a supernova. Massive stars lose a significant fraction of their mass...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online The European Space Agency (ESA) has released an image of the cauldron bubble as seen by its XMM-Newton space telescope. The cauldron bubble lies 5,000 light-years away from Earth, and is a bubble bursting with the fiery stellar wind of a star. Sitting in the constellation of Canis Major, the bubble spans nearly 60 light-years across and was blown by the stellar wind of the Wolf Rayet star HD 50896. This pink star is near the...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One recently discovered star seems to have a split personality, with both a magnetar and pulsar consuming the object. The European Space Agency (ESA) said the newly discovered star appears to be a pulsar while hiding an intense internal magnetic field like a magnetar. The internal field is many times stronger than its external magnetic field, leading to its entry into the new class of "low-field...

[ Watch the Video ] redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online ESA's XMM-Newton has helped to reveal the violent behavior of a young Sun-like star spinning at high speed and spewing out super-hot plasma. Along with information from NASA’s Chandra and Japan’s Suzaku, the findings shed new light on one of the most primary issues in astronomy: the birth of stars like our own Sun. Such stars are born from clouds of gas and dust. These fall apart under gravity and...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Researchers may have discovered the fastest moving pulsar ever seen using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton. Astronomers used X-ray observations, combined with infrared data from the 2MASS project and optical data from the Digitized Sky Survey to find evidence for the record-breaking pulsar. The XMM-Newton image was produced when a massive star exploded as a supernova, leaving behind a...

Observations by two of the European Space Agency's space observatories have provided a multi-wavelength view of the mysterious galaxy Centaurus A. The elliptical galaxy Centaurus A at visible, far-infrared and x-ray wavelengths. In visible light the galaxy appears as a ball of stars, with a thick lane of dust running across it. The far-infrared light shows the glow from jets of material emanating from near the black hole in the galaxy’s core. Also visible is a twisted disc of dust, the...

The Eagle Nebula as never seen before. In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope's 'Pillars of Creation' image of the Eagle Nebula became one of the most iconic images of the 20th century. Now, two of ESA's orbiting observatories have shed new light on this enigmatic star-forming region. The Eagle Nebula is 6500 light-years away in the constellation of Serpens. It contains a young hot star cluster, NGC6611, visible with modest back-garden telescopes, that is sculpting and illuminating the...