Black Holes

A Planetary System That Never Was Teaches About Those That May Be

May 22, 2012

While Kepler and similar missions are turning up planets by the fist full, there’s long been many places that astronomers haven’t expected to find planetary systems. The main places include regions where gravitational forces conspire to make the region around potential host stars too unstable to form into planets. And there’s no place in the [...]

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Black Holes are More Like Venus Fly Traps than Vacuum Cleaners

May 2, 2012

I’m going to try and say this before the Bad Astronomer does: Holy Haleakala! A team of astronomers using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Mount Haleakala in Hawaii have found evidence of a black hole ripping a star to shreds. While this isn’t the first time this type of activity has been detected, these new observations [...]

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Chandra Witnesses Big Blast from an Old Black Hole

April 30, 2012

Astronomers keeping an eye out for a supernova explosion in the nearby galaxy M83 instead witnessed a prodigious blast of another type: a new ultraluminous X-ray source, or ULX. In what scientists are calling an “extraordinary outburst,” the ULX in M83 increased in X-ray brightness by at least 3,000 times, one of the largest changes [...]

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The Heavens are Ablaze With Blazars

April 12, 2012

From a JPL press release: Astronomers are actively hunting a class of supermassive black holes throughout the universe called blazars thanks to data collected by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The mission has revealed more than 200 blazars and has the potential to find thousands more.

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Journal Club – Black Holes Made All The Difference

March 24, 2012

According to Wikipedia, a journal club is a group of individuals who meet regularly to critically evaluate recent articles in the scientific literature. And of course, the first rule of Journal Club is… don’t talk about Journal Club. So, without further ado – today’s article is about how turning complex theory into plain English can [...]

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Can “Warp Speed” Planets Zoom Through Interstellar Space?

March 24, 2012

Nearly ten years ago, astronomers were stunned to discover a star that had been apparently flung from its own system and travelling at over a million kilometers per hour. Over the years, a question was brought up: If stars can be ejected at a high velocity, what about planets? Avi Loeb (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) [...]

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X-rays Reveal a Stellar-Mass Black Hole in Andromeda

February 23, 2012

An ultraluminous x-ray source (ULX) previously spotted in the neighboring Andromeda galaxy by NASA’s Chandra observatory has now been revealed to be a stellar-mass black hole, according to researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. The black hole was the first ULX seen in Andromeda, as well as the closest ever observed.

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Chandra Spots a Black Hole’s High-Speed Hurricane

February 21, 2012

Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have reported record-breaking wind speeds coming from a stellar-mass black hole. The “wind”, a high-speed stream of material that’s being drawn off a star orbiting the black hole and ejected back out into space, has been clocked at a staggering 20 million miles per hour — 3% the speed of light! [...]

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Young Star Cluster In Disintegrated Galaxy Reveals First-Ever Intermediate Mass Black Hole

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 [...]

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Emerging Supermassive Black Holes Choke Star Formation

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 [...]

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First-Ever Image of a Black Hole to be Captured by Earth-Sized Scope

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 [...]

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Does Starburst Activity Starve Galaxies of Gas?

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 [...]

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Dodging Black Hole Bullets

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 [...]

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In The Still Of The Night… Listening To The “Heartbeat” Of A Tiny Black Hole

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 [...]

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First Look at a Black Hole’s Feast

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 [...]

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Looking at Early Black Holes with a ‘Time Machine’

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 [...]

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Astronomers Find the Most Supermassive Black Holes Yet

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 [...]

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Astronomers Discover Ancient ‘Ultra-Red’ Galaxies

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 [...]

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Astronomers Complete the Puzzle of Black Hole Description

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 [...]

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Hubble Telescope Directly Observes Quasar Accretion Disc Surrounding Black Hole

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 [...]

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