When the giant radio galaxy Messier 87 (M 87) unleashed a torrent of gamma radiation and radio flux, an international collaboration of 390 scientists happened to be watching. They're reporting the discovery in this week's issue of Science Express.
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes, galaxies | 10 Comments »
It's the Goldilocks variety of black holes: not too big and not too small.
The new source HLX-1, the light blue object to the top left of the galactic bulge, is the ambassador for a new class of black holes, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun. It lies on the periphery of the edge-on spiral galaxy ESO 243-49, about 290 million light years from Earth.
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes | 11 Comments »
Credit: Left panel: X-ray (NASA/CXC/Durham Univ./D.Alexander et al.); Optical (NASA/ESA/STScI/IoA/S.Chapman et al.); Lyman-alpha Optical (NAOJ/Subaru/Tohoku Univ./T.Hayashino et al.); Infrared (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Durham Univ./J.Geach et al.); Right, Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
Astronomers say they've discovered the "coming of age" of galaxies and black holes, thanks to new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes. The new discovery helps resolve the true nature of gigantic blobs of gas observed around very young galaxies, and sheds light on the formation of galaxies and black holes.
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes, galaxies | 177 Comments »
Using a new computer model, astronomers have determined that the black hole in the center of the M87 galaxy is at least twice as big as previously thought. Weighing in at 6.4 billion times the Sun’s mass, it is the most massive black hole yet measured, and this new model suggest that the accepted black hole masses in other large nearby galaxies may be off by similar amounts. This has consequences for theories of how galaxies form and grow, and might even solve a long-standing astronomical paradox.
Read more…
Filed under: Black Holes, galaxies | 9 Comments »
Stars don't seem to mind where they grow up. Either in a nice quiet neighborhood or in the hellish environment near a supermassive black hole, astronomers were surprised to find the same proportions of low- and high-mass young stars in different types of star forming regions. Using the Very Large Telescope, astronomers snapped one of the sharpest views ever of the Arches Cluster — an extraordinary dense cluster of young stars near the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. “With the extreme conditions in the Arches Cluster, one might indeed imagine that stars won’t form in the same way as in our quiet solar neighbourhood,” says Pablo Espinoza, the lead author of the paper reporting the new results. “However, our new observations showed that the masses of stars in this cluster actually do follow the same universal law”.
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes | 15 Comments »
The ghost of HDF 130. Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.); Optical (SDSS), Radio (STFC/JBO/MERLIN)
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes, Chandra | 71 Comments »
1H0707-495
Astronomers have probed closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy that was once thought to be shrouded in dust — which will greatly advance the look captured in this NASA file image from the mid-1990s. Using new data from ESA’s X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission (XMM)-Newton spaceborne observatory, researchers peered into the innermost depths of the object, which lies at the heart of the galaxy known as 1H0707-495.
“We can now start to map out the region immediately around the black hole,” says Andrew Fabian, at the University of Cambridge, who headed the observations and analysis.
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes | 34 Comments »
In 1971 physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that there might be "mini" black holes all around us that were created by the Big Bang. The violence of the rapid expansion following the beginning of the Universe could have squeezed concentrations of matter to form miniscule black holes, so small they can't even be seen in a regular microscope. But what if these mini black holes were everywhere, and in fact, what if they make up the fabric of the universe? A new paper from two researchers in California proposes this idea.
Read more…
Filed under: Black Holes, Physics | 122 Comments »
Here's another "rogue black hole" theory, which hopefully doesn't set the doomsday crowd off on a new tangent. But new research suggests that hundreds of massive black holes, left over from the early galaxy-building days of the Universe, may wander the Milky Way. Astrophysicists Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb say that rogue black holes originally lurked at the centers of tiny, low-mass galaxies. Over billions of years, those dwarf galaxies smashed together to form full-sized galaxies like the Milky Way. But they also predict that Earth should be safe, as the closest rogue black hole should reside thousands of light-years away.
Read more…
Filed under: Black Holes | 52 Comments »
For all you dark matter and dark energy fans out there, now there's another new "dark" to add to the list. It's called "dark gulping," and it involves a process which may explain how supermassive black holes were able to form in the early universe. Astronomers from the University College of London (UCL) propose that dark gulping occurred when there were gravitational interactions between the invisible halo of dark matter in a cluster of galaxies and the gas embedded in the dark matter halo. This occurred when the Universe was less than a billion years old. They found that the interactions cause the dark matter to form a compact central mass, which can be gravitationally unstable, and collapse. The fast dynamical collapse is the dark gulping.
Read more…
Filed under: Black Holes, Dark Energy, Dark Matter | 41 Comments »
Compact, ultrabright jets at supermassive black holes in active galaxies were already known to pack an impressive punch in radio waves. And now, an international team of scientists says they're kicking out high-energy gamma rays too.
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes, Gamma Ray Bursts | 20 Comments »
Astronomers have found the most distant signs of water in the Universe to date. The water vapor is thought to be contained in a maser, a jet ejected from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, named MG J0414+0534. The radiation from the water maser was emitted when the Universe was only about 2.5 billion years old, a fifth of its current age. "The radiation that we detected has taken 11.1 billion years to reach the Earth, said Dr. John McKean of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). "However, because the Universe has expanded like an inflating balloon in that time, stretching out the distances between points, the galaxy in which the water was detected is about 19.8 billion light years away."
Read more…
Filed under: Black Holes, Gravitational Lensing, galaxies | 10 Comments »
The view from within a black hole? Credit: University of Colorado
Filed under: Black Holes | 56 Comments »
Crowded star field around GRS 1915 and its close-up (inset). Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Harvard/J. Neilsen et al. Optical: Palomar DSS2.
Stellar-mass black holes, between 7 and 25 times the Sun’s mass, are called “micro-quasars" when they spawn powerful jets of particles and radiation, miniature versions of those seen in quasars. Stellar-mass black holes are on the small end of the scale opposite supermassive black holes, including those in quasars, which weigh millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun.
The micro-quasars' jets may be part of a secret weapon for keeping their petite figures, according to new research.
Filed under: Astronomy, Black Holes | 124 Comments »
Artist's conception of the binary supermassive black hole system. Credit P. Marenfeld, NOAO
Paired black holes are theorized to be common, but have escaped detection — until now.
Astronomers Todd Boroson and Tod Lauer, from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona, have found what looks like two massive black holes orbiting each other in the center of one galaxy. Their discovery appears in this week's issue of Nature.
Astronomers have long suspected that most large galaxies harbor black holes at their center, and that most galaxies have undergone some kind of merger in their lifetime. But while binary black hole systems should be common, they have proved hard to find. Boroson and Lauer believe they've found a galaxy that contains two black holes, which orbit each other every 100 years or so. They appear to be separated by only 1/10 of a parsec, a tenth of the distance from Earth to the nearest star.
Filed under: Black Holes, galaxies | 195 Comments »
Add new tag Apophis asteroid Asteroids Astronomy Big Bang binoculars black hole Black Holes Carnival of Space comet Earth Extrasolar Planets galaxies galileo gas giants HiRISE japan Jupiter life Mars Mars Rovers Mercury Messier Catalog Moon name a star NASA Neptune pallas planets Pluto rockets Saturn SETI solar Solar System solar wind Space Tourism sun supermassive black holes telescope The Messier Catalog Uranus Venus vesta