Chandra

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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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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Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole is Feasting on Asteroids

February 8, 2012

For the past several years, the Chandra telescope has detected X-ray flares occurring about once a day from the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. These flares last a few hours with brightness ranging from a few times to nearly one hundred times that of the black hole’s regular output. [...]

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Supernova G350 Kicks Up Some X-Ray Dust

February 2, 2012

Located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of our galaxy, a newly photographed supernova remnant cataloged as G350.1+0.3 is making astronomers scratch their heads. The star which created this unusual visage is suspected to have blown its top some 600 to 1,200 years ago. Although it would have been as bright [...]

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X-rays Unwrap a Poky Little Pulsar

December 21, 2011

For the first time astronomers have located a pulsar – the super-dense, spinning remains of a star – nestled within the remnants of a supernova in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The image above, a composite of x-ray and optical light data acquired by NASA’s Chandra Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, shows the pulsar shining brightly on [...]

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Tarantula Nebula Is Growing!

November 12, 2011

Don’t like spiders? Well, here’s one that will grow on you! Located about 160,000 light years in the web of the Large Magellanic Cloud, star-forming region 30 Doradus is best known as the “Tarantula Nebula”. But don’t let it “bug” you… this space-born arachnid is home to giant stars whose intense radiation causes stellar winds [...]

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Galaxy Interactions Could Cause Overweight Black Holes

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 [...]

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Mosaic: Chandra Spacecraft Made from Chandra Images

October 25, 2011

Here’s a nifty mosaic from the folks at Chandra: a representation of the Chandra spacecraft made from images taken by the spacecraft itself. It was put together by Chandra illustrator Melissa Weiss. You can download larger and really huge versions of this image at the Chandra website.

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Book Review: The Space Shuttle: Celebrating Thirty Years of NASA’s First Space Plane

October 10, 2011

The space shuttle program is over. The orbiters are being decommissioned, stripped of the components that allowed them to travel in space. For those that followed the program, those that wished they did and those with only a passing interest in what the program accomplished a new book has been produced covering the entirety of [...]

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Welcome To The Heart Of The Milky Way…

October 10, 2011

When it comes to my job, I see a lot of astrophotography. I’ve contemplated innumerable nebulae, viewed myriad galaxies and dreamed over abounding star clusters. Each photo is a work of art in its own right – where the palette is a computer program and the canvas is a screen. These creations are stunning, showing [...]

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The Crab Gets Cooked With Gamma Rays

October 7, 2011

It’s one of the most famous sights in the night sky… and 957 years ago it was bright enough to be seen during the day. This supernova event was one of the most spectacular of its kind and it still delights, amazes and even surprises astronomers to this day. Think there’s nothing new to know [...]

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Looking Into The Eye Of A Monster – Active Galaxy Markarian 509

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 [...]

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Stellar X-Rays Strip Planet To Bare Bones

September 15, 2011

Some 880 light years away, a star named CoRoT-2a is busy decimating one of its planets – CoRoT-2b. Orbiting the parent star at a distance of over two million miles is dangerous business in this cosmic neighborhood. While the intrepid exoplanet might be about a thousand times the size of Earth right now, it’s getting [...]

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Galaxy Bets On A Pair Of Black Holes

September 2, 2011

About 160 million light years away in the constellation of Hydra, spiral galaxy NGC 3393 has been keeping a billion year old secret. It might have a poker face, but it has a pair of black holes up its sleeve…

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Chandra Captures Enticing Evidence Of Black Hole’s Bondi Radius

July 29, 2011

Those who are interested in black holes are familiar with the event horizon, but the Chandra X-Ray Observatory is giving us an even more detailed look into the structure surrounding these enigmas by imaging the inflowing hot gases. Galaxy NGC 3115 contains a supermassive black hole at its heart and for the first time astronomers [...]

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Catch A Pulsar By The Tail

July 15, 2011

Originally discovered by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope in 2009, Pulsar PSR J0357 had a bit of a surprise for astronomers when NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory turned an eye its way. Even though it might be 1,600 light years from Earth and half a million years old, it would appear this object has a [...]

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A Four Cluster Pile-Up

June 24, 2011

Abell 2744, shown above in a composite of images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, is one of the most complex and dramatic collisions ever seen between galaxy clusters.

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Black Hole Devours Star and Hurls Energy Across 3.8 Billion Light Years

June 17, 2011

Engaging the Hubble Space Telescope, Swift satellite and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers at the University of Warwick were quick to pick up a signal from Swift’s Burst Alert Telescope on March 28, 2011. In a classic line from Easy Rider, Jack Nicholson says: “It’s a UFO beaming back at you.” But this time it [...]

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Baby Black Holes Grew Up Fast

June 16, 2011

For more than six weeks, the watchful eye of NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory kept track of a small portion of sky dubbed the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). Its object was to research 200 distant galaxies dating back to about 800 million to 950 million years old. What Chandra was looking for was evidence of [...]

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