Astronomers are poised Wednesday to unveil the first direct image of a black hole and the surrounding whirlwind of white-hot gas and plasma inexorably drawn by gravity into its ravenous maw, along with the light they generate.
Astronomy
Apr 9, 2019
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Supermassive black holes that weigh several billion times the mass of our sun are present at the centers of active galaxies. Astronomers observe them as bright galactic cores where the galaxy's supermassive black hole devours ...
Astronomy
Jun 6, 2023
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7833
When you look up at the night sky, how do you know whether the specks of light that you see are bright and far away, or relatively faint and close by? One way to find out is to compare how much light the object actually emits ...
Astronomy
Oct 1, 2020
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Roughly 90 percent of the biggest black holes in the known universe are dormant, meaning that they are not actively devouring matter and, consequently, not giving off any light or other radiation. But sometimes a star wanders ...
Astronomy
Jun 22, 2016
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A white dwarf star can explode as a supernova when its mass exceeds the limit of about 1.4 solar masses. A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching and involving the University of ...
Astronomy
Mar 24, 2023
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Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across - eight times the distance from Earth to the Moon - spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light. Such an object exists: the supermassive black ...
Astronomy
Feb 27, 2013
61
0
All you need is a 20 cm telescope to observe a nearby, active black hole.
Astronomy
Jan 6, 2016
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Over the last 25 years, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets around stars in our galaxy, but more than 99% of them orbit smaller stars—from red dwarfs to stars slightly more massive than our sun, which is considered ...
Astronomy
Aug 12, 2022
0
562
Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) found quasi-periodic flickers in millimeter-waves from the center of the Milky Way, Sagittarius (Sgr) A*. The team interpreted these blinks to be due ...
Astronomy
May 22, 2020
12
763
In May 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) team released the first-ever radio image of M87's central black hole. It was a stunning revelation based on observations made using a worldwide array of radio telescopes. Recently, ...
Astronomy
Apr 30, 2023
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