Latest Supermassive black holes Stories
The galaxy known as M87 has a fastball that would be the envy of any baseball pitcher. It has thrown an entire star cluster toward us at more than two million miles per hour.
A pair of supermassive black holes in orbit around one another have been spotted by XMM-Newton.
When a star orbits too close to a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole, it gets torn apart and sucked in by gravitational forces – a phenomenon known as an a tidal disruption.
Right now a doomed gas cloud is edging ever closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. These black holes feed on gas and dust all the time, but astronomers rarely get to see mealtime in action.
While experts might not know exactly how supermassive black holes grow to sizes up to a billion times that of our sun, astronomers believe they have discovered the so-called cosmic seeds that will ultimately become gravity-rich regions from which light cannot escape.
Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's (ESA's) XMM-Newton to show a supermassive black hole six billion light years from Earth is spinning extremely rapidly.
WASHINGTON, March 5, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's (ESA's) XMM-Newton to show a supermassive black hole
Typically filled with only the oldest stars, which are relatively low in mass and appear red, giant elliptical galaxies have long baffled astronomers. These galaxies are mysteriously shut down with respect to star-forming activity
An international team of astronomers used NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite data and found huge clouds of gas orbiting supermassive black holes.
Exploring the universe's most violent events using computer simulations is what Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz does. So in 2012, when the first detailed observations of a star being ripped apart by a black hole were reported in Nature, Ramirez-Ruiz was eager to compare the data to his simulations.
Supermassive Black Hole -- A Supermassive black hole is a black hole with a mass in the range of millions or billions solar masses. A supermassive black hole has some interesting properties differing from his low-mass cousins: -- The average density of a supermassive black hole can be very low, and actually can be lower than water's density. This happens because the black hole diameter increases linearly with mass, and consequently density drops much faster. -- Strong tidal...
Seyfert Galaxy -- Seyfert galaxies are spiral or irregular galaxies containing an extremely bright nucleus, most likely caused by a supermassive black hole, that can sometimes outshine the surrounding galaxy. The light from the central nucleus varies in less than a year, which implies that the emitting region must be less than one light year across. They are named for the astronomer Carl Seyfert, who studied them extensively in the 1940s. They are a subclass of active galactic nuclei....
Quasar -- A quasar (from quasi-stellar radio source) is an astronomical object that looks like a star in optical telescopes (i.e. it is a point source), but has a very high redshift. The general consensus is that this high redshift is cosmological, the result of Hubble's law and that their redshift indicates that they are typically very distant from Earth; we observe them as they were several billions of years ago. Since we can see them despite their distance, they must emit more...
- A person who stands up for something, as contrasted to a bystander who remains inactive.
- One of the upright handlebars on a traditional Inuit sled.