Tag Archive for 'Supermassive black hole'

A star known as S0-2 made its closest approach to Sagittarius A*, the a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, in 2018. Image credit: Nicolle Fuller / National Science Foundation.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity Aces Relativistic Redshift Test

Jul 26, 2019 by News Staff

In a test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity near the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, an international group of...

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...

$This Hubble image shows the dwarf starburst galaxy ESO 495-21. The galaxy is just 3,000 light-years across, a fraction of the size of the Milky Way, but that is not stopping the galaxy from furiously forming huge numbers of stars. This image is a composite of separate exposures acquired by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) instruments. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble.$

Dwarf Starburst Galaxy Harbors Supermassive Black Hole

Jun 14, 2019 by News Staff

A starburst galaxy called ESO 495-21 is just 3,000 light-years across, but it harbors a black hole of about one million solar masses at its core. This...

An artist’s impression of a disk of cool interstellar gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Image credit: NRAO / AUI / NSF / S. Dagnello.

ALMA Spots Rotating Disk of Cool Hydrogen around Milky Way’s Central Black Hole

Jun 7, 2019 by News Staff

There is a supermassive black hole of nearly 4 million solar masses at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. A large reservoir of hot and cooler hydrogen...

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,...

VLA image of Cygnus A’s central region. Image credit: Carilli et al / NRAO / AUI / NSF.

Astronomers Capture Direct Image of Active Galactic Nucleus Torus

Apr 5, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) have caught the direct image of the thick torus surrounding the supermassive black hole...

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope produced this composite image of the central region of our Milky Way Galaxy. Note that the center of the Galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ESA / CXC / STScI.

NASA: 360-Degree Visualization Shows Galactic Center

Mar 26, 2019 by News Staff

A new immersive, 360-degree, ultra-high-definition visualization provides more details of what NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory sees in X-rays around...

The ‘Teacup’ quasar is causing an ongoing storm. The ‘handle’ is a ring of X-ray (blue) and optical (red and green) light surrounding a giant bubble, shown in the Chandra and Hubble data. This handle-shaped feature, which is located about 30,000 light-years from the galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, was likely formed by one or more eruptions powered by the black hole. Image credit: X-ray -- NASA / CXC / University of Cambridge / G. Lansbury et al; optical - NASA / STScI / W. Keel et al; radio - NRAO / VLA.

‘Teacup’ Quasar Causes Galactic Storms

Mar 18, 2019 by News Staff

SDSS J143029.88+133912.0, nicknamed the ‘Teacup’ because of its shape, is a quasar located about 1.1 billion light-years away. The power source of...

An artist’s impression of a quasar. Image credit: Yoshiki Matsuoka.

Eighty-Three Quasars Spotted in Early Universe

Mar 14, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Subaru Telescope have discovered 83 quasars in the distant Universe, from a time when the Universe was less than 10% of its present...

The main part of this graphic is from the Millenium simulation, which uses supercomputers to formulate how the key components of the Universe, including the WHIM, would have evolved over cosmic time. If these filaments exist, they could absorb certain types of light such as X-rays that pass through them. The inset in this graphic represents some of the X-ray data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory from a distant, rapidly-growing supermassive black hole known as a quasar. The plot is a spectrum -- the amount of X-rays over a range of wavelengths -- from a new study of the quasar H1821+643 that is located about 3.4 billion light years from Earth. Image credit: Springel et al / NASA / CXC / CfA / Kovacs et al.

Astrophysicists May Have Found Universe’s ‘Missing Mass’

Feb 18, 2019 by News Staff

About a third of the normal matter — meaning hydrogen, helium and other elements — created shortly after the Big Bang is not seen in the present-day...

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...

Less than a billion years after the Big Bang, a supermassive black hole began devouring anything within its gravitational grasp; this triggered a firestorm of star formation around the black hole; a galaxy was being born; a blowtorch of energy blazed across the Universe. Now, 12.8 billion years later, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured the beacon from this event. But the telescope needed help to spot it: the gravitational warping of space by a comparatively nearby intervening galaxy greatly amplified and distorted the quasar’s light, making it the brightest such object seen in the early Universe. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / M. Kornmesser.

Astronomers Find Brightest Quasar of Early Universe

Jan 10, 2019 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have spotted the brightest quasar ever seen in the early Universe. Less than a billion years after...

This new image from Hubble shows an elliptical galaxy called Messier 105. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / C. Sarazin et al.

Hubble Looks at Stunning Elliptical Galaxy Messier 105

Jan 8, 2019 by News Staff

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an amazing new photo of the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 105. This new image from Hubble shows an elliptical...

Large Magellanic Cloud on Collision Course with Milky Way Galaxy

Jan 7, 2019 by News Staff

The Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located approximately 163,000 light-years away, is on a collision course with the Milky Way with which it will...

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...

This map of the entire sky shows the location of 739 blazars used in NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s measurement of the extragalactic background light. The background shows the sky as it appears in gamma rays with energies above 10 billion electron volts, constructed from nine years of observations by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope. The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs along the middle of the plot. Image credit: NASA / DOE / Fermi LAT Collaboration.

Astronomers Trace History of Universe’s Star Formation

Nov 30, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers believe that our Universe began forming the first stars when it was a few hundred million years old. Since then, the Universe has become a...

An artist’s impression of W2246-0526, the most luminous galaxy ever discovered. Image credit: NRAO / AUI / NSF / S. Dagnello.

Universe’s Most Luminous Galaxy Is Accreting Its Smaller Neighbors

Nov 19, 2018 by News Staff

WISE J224607.55-052634.9 (W2246-0526 for short), the most luminous galaxy ever discovered, is accreting (eating) at least three of its smaller neighbors,...

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...

Composite image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2597 showing the fountain-like flow of gas powered by the supermassive black hole in the central galaxy. The yellow is ALMA data of the cold gas. The red is data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope showing the hot hydrogen gas in the same region. The extend purple is the extended hot, ionized gas as imaged by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. Image credit: ALMA / ESO / NAOJ / NRAO / Tremblay et al / AUI / NSF / B. Saxton / NASA / Chandra / VLT.

Giant ‘Fountain’ of Cold Molecular Gas Offers Clues to How Galaxies Evolve

Nov 6, 2018 by News Staff

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) have observed a supermassive black hole acting like a ‘monumental fountain’...

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