Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light. Such an object exists: the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365. Astronomers measured its astonishing spin-rate using data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and […]
Vanderbilt University astronomers say they have identified more than 600 stars that have been violently flung out of the Milky Way toward Andromeda; stellar victims, the scientists believe, of the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s core. Previously, 16 rogue stars traveling fast enough to escape the galaxy’s gravitational grasp had been discovered, but they […]
The X-ray flares that are observed on a daily basis from the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way may represent the demise of asteroids plunging into the singularity, according to an analysis of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. A new report appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical […]
A mechanism for how information might escape from a black hole has been proposed by a team of physicists at Penn State who say that if quantum gravity is considered, then space-time becomes much larger and there is room for information to reappear in the distant future on the other side of what was first […]
Reporting in Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomers using NASA’s Swift satellite and the Japanese Suzaku X-ray observatory say they has discovered a new class of active galactic nuclei (AGN). AGN such as quasars, blazars, and Seyfert galaxies are powered by supermassive black holes and are among the most luminous objects in our Universe, often pouring out […]
NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has detected a cacophony of ultra-deep sound resonating through galaxy M87 thanks to a black hole that emits sounds around 56 octaves below middle C. M87, a giant elliptical galaxy, is centrally located in the Virgo cluster of galaxies and is known to harbor one of the universe’s most massive black […]
Quasars are the brightest objects in the Universe, spewing out enormous amounts of energy making them visible across vast distances. Astronomers have long believed that quasars are in fact super-massive black holes, sitting in the middle of galaxies, sucking in surrounding matter and then emitting radiation. Previous observations of quasars have supported the theory that […]
