Tag Archive for 'Supermassive black hole'

Position and velocity map of the Milky Way Galaxy; arrows show position and velocity data for 224 objects used to model the Galaxy; the solid black lines show the positions of the Galaxy’s spiral arms; the colors indicate groups of objects belonging the same arm. Image credit: NAOJ.

Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole is Closer than Astronomers Thought

Nov 27, 2020 by News Staff

The distance between our Solar System and Sagittarius A*, the 4-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, is approximately 25,800...

This Hubble image of the nearby active galaxy IC 5063 reveals a mixture of bright rays and dark shadows coming from the blazing core, home of a supermassive black hole. Image credit: Credits: NASA / ESA / Hubble / STScI / W.P. Maksym, CfA.

Hubble Spots Shadow of Supermassive Black Hole’s Torus in IC 5063

Nov 23, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have observed spectacular large-scale dark and light rays beaming out of the bright center of IC...

Astronomers Catch Radio Jets from Distant Quasars

Nov 20, 2020 by News Staff

Using data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS), astronomers have detected young radio-emitting jets from supermassive black holes in distant active...

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.

Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole is Spinning Slowly, Astronomers Say

Oct 28, 2020 by News Staff

Supermassive black holes are characterized by just two numbers: mass and spin, but have a critical influence on the formation and evolution of galaxies....

Astronomers Monitor Flare from Nearby, Fast-Evolving Tidal Disruption Event

Oct 13, 2020 by News Staff

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and New Technology Telescope (NTT), the Las Cumbres Observatory global telescope network, and NASA’s Neil Gehrel...

Visualization of the new gauge developed to test the predictions of modified gravity theories against the measurement of the size of M87*’s shadow. Image credit: D. Psaltis, University of Arizona / EHT Collaboration.

Shadow of Messier 87’s Supermassive Black Hole Puts General Relativity to Test

Oct 2, 2020 by News Staff

The 2017 observations from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) of M87*, a 6.5-billion-solar-mass black hole in the center of the giant elliptical galaxy...

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 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...

An artist’s impression of plasma jets coming from a supermassive black hole in the central galaxy of the Phoenix cluster. Image credit: NAOJ.

Astronomers Detect Black-Hole Jets in Central Galaxy of Phoenix Cluster

Sep 1, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) have detected plasma jets coming from a supermassive black hole in the central galaxy of...

SDSS J141637.44+003352.2, a dual quasar at a distance for which the light reaching us was emitted 4.6 billion years ago. The two quasars are 13,000 light-years apart on the sky, placing them near the center of a single massive galaxy that appears to be part of a group, as shown by the neighboring galaxies in the left panel. In the lower panels, optical spectroscopy has revealed broad emission lines associated with each of the two quasars, indicating that the gas is moving at thousands of kilometers per second in the vicinity of two distinct supermassive black holes. The two quasars are different colors, due to different amounts of dust in front of them. Image credit: Silverman et al, doi: 10.3847/1538-4357/aba4a3.

Astronomers Find Three Luminous Dual Quasars

Aug 27, 2020 by News Staff

Using the Subaru Telescope and W. M. Keck and Gemini observatories, astronomers have spotted three dual quasars — merging galaxy systems that have...

This multi-frequency composite VLBA image shows young radio jets originating near a supermassive black hole at the core of the active galaxy TXS 0128+554; the jets in this image started about 80 years ago, stopped, then resumed about 10 years ago. Image credit: Lister et al / Sophia Dagnello, NRAO / AUI / NSF.

Astronomers Observe Young, Radio-Emitting Jets in Distant Active Galaxy

Aug 27, 2020 by News Staff

Around five years ago, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected high-energy gamma rays coming from TXS 0128+554, an elliptical galaxy located...

Astronomers Detect Anomalous Cold Gas Outflow from Milky Way’s Center

Aug 20, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers have observed cold, dense and high-velocity molecular gas outflowing from the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The presence of this gas is puzzling,...

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...

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...

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...

About 3.5 million years, a tremendous explosion rocked the center of our galaxy. Our distant hominid ancestors, already afoot on the African plains, likely would have seen the resulting flare as a ghostly glow high overhead in the night sky. Image credit: NASA / ESA / G. Cecil, UNC, Chapel Hill & J. DePasquale, STScI.

Astronomers Uncover New Clues about Ancient Explosion in Milky Way’s Center

Jun 3, 2020 by News Staff

About 3.5 million years ago, a so-called Seyfert flare from Sagittarius A*, Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, created two enormous ionization cones...

PKS 2014-55 is classified as ‘X-shaped’ because of its appearance in previous relatively blurry images. The detail provided in this radio image obtained with the MeerKAT telescope indicates that its shape is best described as a double boomerang. Two powerful jets of radio waves, indicated in blue color, each extend 2.5 million light-years into space. Eventually, they are ‘turned back’ by the pressure of tenuous intergalactic gas. As they flow back towards the central galaxy, they are deflected by its relatively high gas pressure into the shorter, horizontal, arms of the boomerang. The background image shows visible light from myriad galaxies in the distant Universe. Image credit: NRAO / AUI / NSF / SARAO / DES.

Astronomers Crack Mystery of X-Shaped Radio Galaxies

May 8, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using the MeerKAT telescope at the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cape Town, South Africa, have solved a longstanding mystery...

This artist’s impression shows how ULAS J1120+0641, a very distant quasar powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, may have looked. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.

New Measurements of Fine-Structure Constant Suggest Laws of Nature Not as Constant as Previously Thought

Apr 29, 2020 by News Staff

The fine-structure constant is a measure of electromagnetism — one of the four fundamental forces in nature; the others are gravity, weak nuclear...

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...

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