A binary system containing a massive star and possibly a black hole, together being a source of intense X-rays, has been shown to be a smaller-scale example of some of the brightest quasars on Earth. Universe. New findings from an international team used NASA‘S Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer spacecraft (IXPE), approximately 24,000 images of an… Read More »
A bright quasar powered by a supermassive black hole is blasting radiation that pushes surrounding gas clouds to produce winds reaching speeds of about 36 million miles per hour (58 million kilometers per hour). Oh, and the quasar is almost as old as the universe itself. The discovery, made by a team of scientists led… Read More »
A binary black hole system in an active galaxy about 4 billion light-years away was seen to brighten dramatically when one of the black holes briefly formed the accretion disk of the other into a double star. quasar. A quasar is the extremely active core of a distant galaxy. This activity is a product of… Read More »
Eventually all galaxies, including our Milky Way, will come to an end. So how do galaxies die? If you’re in the mood to destroy an entire galaxy, you have a few options depending on the level of destruction you want. Relating to: Monstrous black holes may have killed host galaxies in the early universe Option… Read More »
As astronomers chronicle the growth of galaxies by combining X-ray observations with detailed supercomputer models, the history of the dark hearts of galaxies has been told almost completely for the first time. supermassive black holes More than 12 billion years of cosmic history. By doing this, scientists showed that there is a black hole at… Read More »
Astronomers have detected flares and echoes from Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. These “cosmic fireworks” and X-ray echoes could help scientists better understand the dark and silent cosmic titan around which our galaxy revolves. A team of Michigan State University researchers made the groundbreaking discovery… Read More »
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have mapped for the first time the plasma “burps” of a quasar powered by a feeding supermassive black hole living relatively close to Earth. While supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times that of the Sun are thought to be at the heart of all galaxies,… Read More »
Scientists have discovered strong evidence that there are some. big stars They end their existence not with a bang but with a whimper and sink into a swamp. black hole Without the light and anger of a being, their own actions supernova. To understand why this matters, we need to start with a crash course… Read More »
The “shaking” remains of a star that suffered a grisly death at the maw of a supermassive black hole have helped reveal the spin rate of the cosmic predator. Supermassive black holes are believed to be born through successive mergers of smaller black holes; Each of these brings with it angular momentum that accelerates the… Read More »
NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope could use the grisly death of stars being torn apart by black holes to hunt for the universe’s first population of stellar bodies. These early stars, referred to (somewhat confusingly) as Population III (Pop III) stars, were very different from the sun and other stars seen in the cosmos… Read More »