Tag Archive for 'Black hole'

This composite image shows the surroundings of a supermassive black hole that is triggering star formation across the longest distance ever seen; as hot gas swirls around the black hole, it emits large amounts of X-rays that Chandra detects; the black hole is also the source of radio-wave emission from a jet of high-energy particles -- previously detected by scientists with the VLA -- that stretches about a million light-years. Image credit: NASA / CXC / INAF / R. Gilli et al / NRAO / VLA / STScI.

Supermassive Black Hole Triggers Star Formation in Multiple Galaxies

Dec 5, 2019 by News Staff

Enormous black holes usually affect their surroundings through the so-called ‘negative feedback’ — in other words, suppressing the formation...

Astronomers Find ‘Impossible’ Stellar Black Hole in Milky Way

Nov 29, 2019 by Natali Anderson

An international team of astronomers has discovered an exceptionally massive black hole of stellar origin with a mass 68 times that of the Sun. An artist’s...

An artist’s impression of planets orbiting a supermassive black hole. Image credit: Kagoshima University.

Planets May Form and Orbit around Supermassive Black Holes

Nov 25, 2019 by Enrico de Lazaro

Protoplanetary disks around stars may not be the only site for planet formation in the Universe, according to a team of theoretical astrophysicists from...

NGC 6240 harbors three supermassive black holes at its core: the northern black hole (N) is active and was known before; the zoomed-in new high-spatial resolution image shows that the southern component consists of two supermassive black holes (S1 and S2); the green color indicates the distribution of gas ionized by radiation surrounding the black holes; the red lines show the contours of the starlight from the galaxy and the length of the white bar corresponds to 1,000 light years. Image credit: P. Weilbacher, Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam / NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage / STScI / AURA / Hubble Collaboration / A. Evans, University of Virginia, Charlottesville / NRAO / Stony Brook University.

Astronomers Find Three Supermassive Black Holes in NGC 6240

Nov 22, 2019 by News Staff

NGC 6240, a well-studied nearby galaxy system in the process of merging, contains three supermassive black holes at its core, two of which are active and...

An artist’s rendition of a giant star in orbit around a low-mass black hole. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

New Class of Low-Mass Black Holes May Exist, Astronomers Say

Nov 1, 2019 by News Staff

In a paper published in the November 1, 2019 issue of the journal Science, a team of astronomers offers a new way to search for stellar-mass black holes,...

Dwarf galaxies hosting active galactic nuclei that have spatially extended outflows. Image credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Black Hole-Driven Winds Suppress Star Formation in Dwarf Galaxies

Oct 14, 2019 by News Staff

Supermassive black hole-driven outflows in dwarf galaxies have a significant impact on the evolution of these galaxies by suppressing star formation, according...

Pfeifle et al provide the strongest evidence yet for a system of three supermassive black holes. Image credit: NASA / CXC / George Mason University / R. Pfeifle et al / SDSS / NASA / STScI.

Astronomers Find Triple Supermassive Black Hole

Sep 29, 2019 by News Staff

Using data from several space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have discovered a system of three supermassive black holes within SDSS J084905.51+111447.2,...

When a star strays too close to a black hole, intense tides break it apart into a stream of gas. The tail of the stream escapes the system, while the rest of it swings back around, surrounding the black hole with a disk of debris. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

TESS Spots Its First Tidal Disruption Event

Sep 27, 2019 by News Staff

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) gave astronomers an unexpected glimpse at a black hole violently ripping apart a Sun-sized star....

This image highlights and explains various aspects of the black hole visualization. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Jeremy Schnittman.

New Visualization Reveals Warped World of a Black Hole

Sep 26, 2019 by News Staff

A new visualization created by a team of astrophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center illustrates how black hole’s gravity distorts our view,...

This visible-light image of NGC 6946 comes from the Digital Sky Survey, and is overlaid with data from NASA’s NuSTAR observatory (in blue and green). ULX-4 is the green blob near the bottom of the galaxy. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

NuSTAR Spots Mysterious Source of Ultraluminous X-Rays in Nearby Spiral Galaxy

Sep 5, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) have found a remarkable source of X-rays in NGC 6946, a spiral galaxy located...

ALMA made the most precise measurements of cold gas swirling around a supermassive black hole -- the cosmic behemoth at the center of the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 3258. The multi-color ellipse reflects the motion of the gas orbiting the black hole, with blue indicating motion toward us and red motion away from us. The inset box represents how the orbital velocity changes with distance from the black hole. The material was found to rotate faster the closer in the astronomers observed to the black hole, enabling them to accurately calculate its mass: a whopping 2.25 billion times the mass of our Sun. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / B. Boizelle / AUI / NSF / S. Dagnello / Hubble Space Telescope / NASA / ESA / Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey.

ALMA Determines Mass of Supermassive Black Hole in NGC 3258

Aug 8, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have observed the dynamical sphere of influence of a supermassive black hole...

Supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies blast radiation and ultra-fast winds outward, as illustrated in this artist’s conception. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Ultramassive Black Hole Found in Elliptical Galaxy Holmberg 15A

Aug 5, 2019 by Sergio Prostak

Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have discovered an enormous black hole at the center of Holmberg 15A, a supergiant elliptical galaxy...

An artist’s impression of the peculiar thin disk of material circling a supermassive black hole at the heart of NGC 3147. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESA / Hubble.

Thin Accretion Disk around NGC 3147’s Central Black Hole Surprises Astronomers

Jul 12, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have found an unexpected thin disk of material furiously whirling around a supermassive black hole...

Dai et al used Chandra to measure the spin of five quasars. Gravitational lensing of the light from each of these black holes by an intervening galaxy has created multiple images of each quasar, as shown by these Chandra images of four of the targets. Image credit: NASA / CXC / University of Oklahoma / Dai et al.

Chandra Uses Gravitational Lens to Capture Spinning Black Holes

Jul 5, 2019 by News Staff

By combining the capability of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory with the power of a natural phenomenon called gravitational lensing, a team of astronomers...

NGC 4395 is located in the constellation of Canes Venatici, approximately 14 million light-years away. Image credit: Mount Lemmon Observatory / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Astronomers ‘Weigh’ NGC 4395’s Central Black Hole

Jun 11, 2019 by News Staff

An international team of astronomers has found that the central black hole of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 4395 has a mass of about 10,000 solar masses...

The first artist’s illustration shows a key part of the process that created this new black hole, as the two neutron stars spin around each other while merging. The purple material depicts debris from the merger. Image credit: NASA / CXC / M.Weiss.

LIGO and Virgo Observatories Detect Two New Gravitational Waves

May 8, 2019 by News Staff

On April 25 and 26, 2019, NSF’s Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the European-based Virgo detector registered two new gravitational...

An artist’s impression of the changing jet orientation in the V404 Cygni system; each segment (as separated by the clock hands) shows the jets at a different time, oriented in different directions as seen in our high angular resolution radio imaging. Image credit: ICRAR.

Astronomers See Rapidly Swinging Jets Coming from V404 Cygni

May 2, 2019 by News Staff

V404 Cygni is a binary system comprising a black hole and a star orbiting one another. It lies in the constellation Cygnus at a distance of about 7,800...

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.

Event Horizon Telescope Captures First Image of Black Hole

Apr 10, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes (ALMA, APEX, the IRAM 30-m telescope,...

Nearest Hypervelocity Star May Have Been Ejected from Milky Way’s Disk by Young Stellar Cluster

Mar 15, 2019 by News Staff

Hypervelocity stars are solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way Galaxy. Discovered in 2014, LAMOST-HVS1 is...

Quantum scrambling is one suggestion for how information can fall into a black hole and come out as random-looking radiation. Perhaps, the argument goes, it is not random at all, and black holes are just excellent scramblers. Image credit: E. Edwards / Joint Quantum Institute.

Physicists Use Seven-Qubit Quantum Computer to Simulate Scrambling inside Black Holes

Mar 7, 2019 by News Staff

A team of physicists from the Joint Quantum Institute, the University of Maryland, the University of California Berkeley and Perimeter Institute for Theoretical...

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