Tag Archive for 'Black hole'

This artist’s impression shows a supermassive black hole in the center of SDSS J1030+0524 and six galaxies -- four Lyman-break galaxies and two Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies -- trapped in its gas web. The large web-like structure extends over 300 times the size of the Milky Way. Image credit: L. Calçada / ESO.

Web of the Giant: Astronomers Spot Six Galaxies around Monster Quasar

Oct 2, 2020 by News Staff

Using the MUSE and FORS2 instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have spotted a group of six galaxies around SDSS J1030+0524, a...

The EHT Collaboration unveiled the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the center of the elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary -- the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name -- is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 25 billion miles (40 billion km) across. Image credit: EHT Collaboration.

Crescent Shadow of Messier 87’s Supermassive Black Hole is Wobbling

Sep 23, 2020 by News Staff

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) delivered the first resolved images of M87*, the supermassive black hole in the center of the giant elliptical...

An artist’s impression of a stellar-mass black hole surrounded by a disk of gas and plasma gravitationally pulled from a close binary star companion. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M. Weiss.

Astrophysicists Suggest New Way to Detect Stellar-Mass Black Holes

Sep 22, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

An analysis of archival X-ray data from NASA’s Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer has revealed a clear separation between the characteristics of stellar-mass...

An artist’s impression of binary black holes about to collide. Image credit: Mark Myers, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), Australian National University.

Astronomers Witness Birth of Intermediate-Mass Black Hole

Sep 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the twin LIGO detectors located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo detector located near Pisa, Italy, have...

This two-panel illustration shows a black hole surrounded by a disk of gas, before and after the disk is partially dispersed. In the left panel, the ball of white light above the black hole is the black hole corona, a collection of ultra-hot gas particles that forms as gas from the disk falls into the black hole. The streak of debris falling toward the disk is what remains of a star that was torn apart by the black hole’s gravity. The right panel shows the black hole after the debris from the star has dispersed some of the gas in the disk, causing the corona to disappear. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Colliding Star Destroys Supermassive Black Hole’s Corona in Distant Galaxy

Jul 17, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has watched as an X-ray corona of a supermassive black hole in the active galactic nucleus 1ES 1927+654 was abruptly...

Siraj & Loeb explore the possibility that accretion flares resulting from the tidal disruption of small Oort Cloud bodies by a putative primordial black hole could power an observable optical signal that could be searched for with the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Image credit: Sci-News.com / Zdeněk Bardon / ESO.

Astronomers Develop Method to Detect Tiny Black Holes in Outskirts of Our Solar System

Jul 13, 2020 by News Staff

Amir Siraj and Professor Avi Loeb from the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University have developed a new method to search for primordial black holes...

This illustration shows what the luminous blue variable star in PHL 293B could have looked like before its mysterious disappearance. Image credit: L. Calçada / ESO.

Massive Variable Star Mysteriously Disappears from Distant Dwarf Galaxy

Jun 30, 2020 by News Staff

Using the X-SHOOTER and the ESPRESSO (Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet- and Stable Spectroscopic Observation) instruments on ESO’s Very Large...

An artist’s impression of the quasar Pōniuā`ena. Image credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / P. Marenfeld.

Astronomers Find Monster Quasar in Early Universe

Jun 29, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has discovered the second most distant quasar ever found. Named Pōniuā`ena and designated J100758.264+211529.207...

An artist’s rendition of a mystery compact object in ‘mass gap’ found by LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors. Image credit: LIGO / Caltech / MIT / R. Hurt, IPAC.

GW190814 Sheds Light on Mass Gap between Neutron Stars and Black Holes

Jun 25, 2020 by News Staff

The gravitational-wave signal GW190814, detected on August 14, 2019 by NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the Virgo...

Photons emitted near rotating black holes encode quantum information that can be measured by actual quantum information technology. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Physicists Verify Half-Century-Old Theory about Rotating Black Holes

Jun 24, 2020 by News Staff

Physicists from the University of Glasgow and the University of Arizona have experimentally verified a half-century-old theory that began as speculation...

This image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope shows the energetic Universe. As eROSITA scans the sky, the energy of the collected photons is measured with an accuracy ranging from 2% - 6%. To generate this image, in which the whole sky is projected onto an ellipse (so-called Aitoff projection) with the center of the Milky Way in the middle and the body of our Galaxy running horizontally, photons have been color-coded according to their energy (red for energies 0.3-0.6 keV, green for 0.6-1 keV, blue for 1-2.3 keV). The red diffuse glow away from the galactic plane is the emission of the hot gas in the vicinity of the Solar System (the Local Bubble). Along the plane itself, dust and gas absorb the lowest energy X-ray photons, so that only high-energy emitting sources can be seen, and their color appears blue in the image. The hotter gas close to the Galactic center, shown in green and yellow, carries imprinted the history of the most energetic processes in the life of the Milky Way, such as supernova explosions, driving fountains of gas out of the plane, and, possibly, past outburst from the now dormant supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way. Piercing through this turbulent, hot diffuse medium, are hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources, which appear mostly white in the image, and uniformly distributed over the sky. Among them, distant active galactic nuclei are visible as point sources, while clusters of galaxies reveal themselves as extended X-ray nebulosities. In total, about one million X-ray sources have been detected in this image. Image credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner & the eSASS team / Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics / Eugene Churazov & Marat Gilfanov, IKI.

eROSITA X-Ray Telescope Captures Hot, Energetic Universe

Jun 19, 2020 by News Staff

A new all-sky image from the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard the Spectrum-Roentgen-Gamma (SRG) space observatory contains over one million objects, about...

Chandra Catches Relativistic Jets from Stellar-Mass Black Hole

Jun 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have observed a pair of relativistic jets blasting away from a black hole in the binary system MAXI...

An artist’s impression of the HR 6819 triple system. Image credit: L. Calçada / ESO.

Astronomers Find Closest Black Hole

May 6, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Fiber-fed Extended Range Optical Spectrograph (FEROS) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory have found a...

Chandra and XMM-Newton data indicate that a white dwarf survived a close call with the central black hole in GSN 069. Image credit: NASA / CXO / CSIC-INTA / G. Miniutti et al / CXC / M. Weiss.

Near-Miss Tidal Disruption: White Dwarf Survives Close Encounter with Supermassive Black Hole

Apr 28, 2020 by News Staff

Professor Andrew King from the University of Leicester has shown that periodic X-ray eruptions from a galaxy called GSN 069 could result from the core...

Intermediate-Mass Black Hole Found in Outskirts of Lenticular Galaxy

Apr 1, 2020 by News Staff

A bright X-ray source in a massive star cluster in the outskirts of 6dFGS gJ215022.2-055059, a barred lenticular galaxy located about 806 million light-years...

The collision of two black holes. Image credit: Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes Project.

Astronomers Propose New Mechanism for Growth of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds

Mar 24, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, a team of astronomers in Italy proposes that heavy seeds of supermassive black holes formed via the...

Time-averaged image of a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulation of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87. Image credit: Johnson et al, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz1310.

Astronomers Discover Way to Get Sharp Images of Black Hole’s Photon Rings

Mar 19, 2020 by News Staff

In April 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released stunning images of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87, a giant elliptical...

Evidence for the biggest black hole eruption seen in the Universe comes from a combination of X-ray data from Chandra and XMM-Newton, and the Murchison Widefield Array and Giant Metrewave Telescope, as shown here. The eruption is generated by a black hole located in the central galaxy of the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which has blasted out jets and carved a large cavity in the surrounding hot gas. Image credit: NASA / CXC / NRL / S. Giacintucci et al / ESA / XMM-Newton / NCRA / TIFR / GMRT / 2MASS / UMass / IPAC-Caltech / NSF.

Universe’s Most Powerful Black Hole Eruption Spotted

Feb 28, 2020 by News Staff

Using data from ESA’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space observatories, along with two ground-based radio telescopes in Australia and India,...

This illustration shows the surroundings of a black hole feeding on ambient gas as mapped using ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory. Image credit: ESA.

Astronomers Map Surroundings of Supermassive Black Hole

Jan 22, 2020 by News Staff

As material spirals towards a black hole, it is heated up and emits X-rays that, in turn, echo and reverberate as they interact with nearby gas. These...

An artist’s conception of a dwarf galaxy, its shape distorted, most likely by a past interaction with another galaxy, and a massive black hole in its outskirts (pullout). The black hole is drawing in material that forms a rotating disk and generates jets of material propelled outward. Image credit: Sophia Dagnello, NRAO / AUI / NSF.

Wandering Massive Black Holes Detected in Nearby Dwarf Galaxies

Jan 21, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory have observed 111 nearby dwarf galaxies within...

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