by Tammy Plotner on February 15, 2012
Score another first for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope! Along with observations taken with the Swift X-ray telescope, a team of astronomers have identified a young stellar cluster of stars pointing the way towards the first verified intermediate mass black hole. This grouping of stars provides significant indication that black holes of this type may have [...]
by Tammy Plotner on January 27, 2012
Located on the Chajnantor plateau in the foothills of the Chilean Andes, ESO’s APEX telescope has been busy looking into deep, deep space. Recently a group of astronomers released their findings regarding massive galaxies in connection with extreme times of star formation in the early Universe. What they found was a sharp cut-off point in [...]
by Jason Major on January 17, 2012
“Sgr A* is the right object, VLBI is the right technique, and this decade is the right time.” So states the mission page of the Event Horizon Telescope, an international endeavor that will combine the capabilities of over 50 radio telescopes across the globe to create a single Earth-sized telescope to image the enormous black [...]
by Ray Sanders on January 16, 2012
Using the partially constructed ALMA observatory, a group of astronomers have found new evidence that helps explain how young, star-forming galaxies end up as ‘red and dead’ elliptical galaxies. According to current galactic evolution theories, mergers of spiral galaxies are thought to explain why nearby elliptical galaxies have few young stars. Merging galaxies direct gas [...]
by Tammy Plotner on January 12, 2012
In mid-2009 a binary star system cataloged as H H1743–322 shot off something very unusual. Poised about 28,000 light years distant in the direction of the constellation of Scorpius, this rather ordinary system made up of a normal star and unknown mass black hole was busy exchanging mass. The pair orbits in mere days with [...]
by Tammy Plotner on December 20, 2011
Is everything quiet in deep space? Not hardly. It’s a place jammed with noises of all kinds. So much noise, in fact, that it could be quite difficult to pick up a faint signature of something small… something like the smallest black hole known. Thanks to NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) , an international [...]
by Jason Major on December 15, 2011
A true heart of darkness lies at the center of our galaxy: Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”) is a supermassive black hole with the mass of four million suns packed into an area only as wide as the distance between Earth and the Sun. Itself invisible to direct observation, Sgr A* makes its presence known through [...]
by Ray Sanders on December 13, 2011
What fed early black holes enabling their very rapid growth? A new discovery made by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University using a combination of supercomputer simulations and GigaPan Time Machine technology shows that a diet of cosmic “fast food” (thin streams of cold gas) flowed uncontrollably into the center of the first black holes, causing [...]
by Amy Shira Teitel on December 7, 2011
For years, astronomer Karl Gebhardt and graduate student Jeremy Murphy at The University of Texas at Austin have been hunting for black holes — the dense concentration of matter at the centre of galaxies. Earlier this year, they made a record-breaking discovery. They found a black hole weighing 6.7 billion times the mass of our [...]
by Ray Sanders on December 2, 2011
A team of astronomers, led by Jiasheng Huang (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) using the Spitzer Space Telescope, have discovered four ‘Ultra-Red’ galaxies that formed when our Universe was about a billion years old. Huang and his team used several computer models in an attempt to understand why these galaxies appear so red, stating, “We’ve had [...]
by Gemma Lavender on November 18, 2011
Light may not be able to escape a black hole, but now enough information has escaped one black hole’s clutches that astronomers have, for the first time, been able to provide a complete description of it. A team of astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and San Diego State University have made the [...]
by Tammy Plotner on November 5, 2011
Thanks to the magic of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, a team of international astronomers have made an incredible observation – a quasar accretion disc surrounding a black hole. By employing a technique known as gravitation lensing, the researchers have been able to get an accurate size measurement and spectral data. While you might not [...]
by Ray Sanders on October 31, 2011
Some supermassive black holes are obscured by oddly shaped dust clouds which resemble doughnuts. These clouds have been an unsolved puzzle, but last week a scientist at the University of Leicester proposed a new theory to explain the origins of these clouds, saying that they could be the results of high-speed collisions between planets and [...]
by Tammy Plotner on October 27, 2011
Yep. It’s true. Almost all galaxies are guilty of having a supermassive black hole in their centers. Some even tip the scales at millions – or even billions – of times more mass than the Sun. However, how they came to be so weighty is a true enigma. Thanks to research done by Dr. John [...]
by Tammy Plotner on October 20, 2011
A eye-opening discovery has been made by an international team of scientists led by astronomer Paul van der Werf (Leiden University, The Netherlands). They have discovered a black hole in the early Universe located about 12 billion light years away that’s surrounded by a nearly impenetrable disk of gas and dust. The halo isn’t the [...]
by Jon Voisey on October 16, 2011
The conventional wisdom of galaxies is that they should have a central massive black hole (CMBH). The presence of such objects has been confirmed in our own galaxy as well as numerous other galaxies, including the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and even some dwarf galaxies. The mass of these objects, several million times the mass of [...]
by Tammy Plotner on October 4, 2011
“The world is a vampire, sent to drain… Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flames…” Ah, yes. It’s the biggest vampire of all – the supermassive black hole. In this instance, it’s not any average, garden-variety black hole, but one that’s 300 million times the mass of the Sun and growing. Bullet with butterfly [...]
by Tammy Plotner on September 26, 2011
Nope. A standard candle isn’t the same red, green, blue, yellow and omni-present pink wax sticks that decorate your every day birthday cake. Until now a standard candle meant a Cepheid variable star – or more recently – a Type 1a supernova. But something new happens almost every day in astronomy, doesn’t it? So start [...]
by Tammy Plotner on September 21, 2011
Some 20,000 light years away, a black hole named GX 339-4 has produced one of the most exciting visible events possible – a massive flare. This searing jet is an extraordinary occurrence and astronomers using NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) were able to capture elusive data to further refine their studies of the extreme [...]
by Tammy Plotner on September 20, 2011
Well, we’re off to see the Wizard again, my friends. This time it’s to explore the possibilities of primordial black holes colliding with stars and all the implications therein. If this theory is correct, then we should be able to observe the effects of dark matter first hand – proof that it really does exist [...]