Tag Archive for 'Black hole'

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...

An artist’s impression of a gas cloud swirling around a black hole. Image credit: NAOJ.

ALMA Finds Wandering Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in Milky Way’s Central Region

Mar 1, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have spotted streams of molecular gas orbiting around an invisible gravitational...

In this illustration, MAXI J1820+070 pulls material off a neighboring star and into an accretion disk; above the disk is a region of subatomic particles called the corona. Image credit: Aurore Simonnet / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

NICER Observes ‘X-Ray Echoes’ of Nearby Stellar-Mass Black Hole

Feb 1, 2019 by News Staff

Astrophysicists using NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) have detected X-rays from a stellar-mass black hole called MAXI J1820+070...

A 30,000 light-year region from the Renaissance Simulation centered on a cluster of young galaxies that generate radiation (white) and metals (green) while heating the surrounding gas. A dark matter halo just outside this heated region forms three supermassive stars (inset) each over 1,000 times the mass of our Sun that will quickly collapse into massive black holes and eventually supermassive black holes over billions of years. Image credit: Advanced Visualization Lab, National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

Early Universe’s Massive Black Holes Born in Rapidly-Growing Dark Matter Halos: Study

Jan 28, 2019 by News Staff

When the Universe was less than 1 billion years old, some of its stars turned into supermassive black holes. A key mystery in astronomy has been: why are...

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

Spacetime Geometry near Rotating Black Holes Acts Like Quantum Computer, Physicist Says

Jan 15, 2019 by News Staff

According to a theoretical paper published in the Annals of Physics, by Dr. Ovidiu Racorean from the General Direction of Information Technology in Bucharest,...

An artist’s rendering of the corona around a black hole. Image credit: RIKEN.

Supermassive Black Holes Have Weaker Coronal Magnetic Field Than Expected

Dec 31, 2018 by Enrico de Lazaro

Supermassive black holes that lurk at the center of most galaxies are surrounded by coronas — mysterious features that are sources of highly energetic...

An artist’s depiction of loop quantum gravity effects in a black hole. The bottom half of the image depicts the black hole which, according to general relativity, traps everything including light. Loop quantum gravity overcomes this tremendous pull and liberates everything shown in the top half of image, thus solving the fundamental problem of black hole singularity. Image credit: A. Corichi & J.P. Ruiz.

Loop Quantum Gravity Theory Could Answer Fundamental Questions about Black Holes

Dec 26, 2018 by News Staff

Loop quantum gravity is a theory that uses quantum mechanics to extend gravitational physics beyond Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Previous...

The collision of two black holes is seen in this still from a computer simulation. Image credit: SXS.

Physicists Detect Four New Gravitational Waves

Dec 4, 2018 by News Staff

The twin LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and the Virgo...

Images of four colliding galaxies, along with close-up views of their coalescing nuclei in the bright cores, are shown beneath the Hubble snapshots of NGC 6240. The left image of each pair, showing the merging galaxies, was taken by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). The right image, showing the bright cores, was taken in near-infrared light by the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, using adaptive optics to sharpen the view. The nuclei in each of the Hubble and Keck Observatory infrared photos are only about 3,000 light-years apart -- a near-embrace in cosmic terms. If there are pairs of black holes, they will likely merge within the next 10 million years to form a more massive black hole. These observations are part of the largest-ever survey of the cores of nearby galaxies using high-resolution images in near-infrared light taken by the Hubble and Keck observatories. Image credit: NASA / ESA / M. Koss, Eureka Scientific, Inc / W. M. Keck Observatory / Pan-STARRS.

Astronomers Find Supermassive Black Hole Pairs in Colliding Galaxies

Nov 9, 2018 by News Staff

A team of astronomers led by Michael Koss of Eureka Scientific Inc. has observed several pairs of galaxies in the final stages of merging together into...

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