Small distant galaxies host supermassive black holes

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the Hubble Space Telescope to probe the distant universe, astronomers have found supermassive black holes growing in surprisingly small galaxies. The findings suggest that central black holes formed ...

Researchers detail how a distant black hole devoured a star

(PhysOrg.com) -- Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted ...

Astronomers discover that galaxies are either asleep or awake

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have probed into the distant universe and discovered that galaxies display one of two distinct behaviors: they are either awake or asleep, actively forming stars or are not forming any new stars ...

New class of stellar explosions discovered

They're bright and blue-and a bit strange. They're a new type of stellar explosion that was recently discovered by a team of astronomers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Among the most luminous in ...

New candidate for most distant object in universe

(PhysOrg.com) -- A gamma-ray burst detected by NASA's Swift satellite in April 2009 has been newly unveiled as a candidate for the most distant object in the universe. At an estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, ...

First galaxies were born much earlier than expected (w/ video)

(PhysOrg.com) -- Using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation ...

Cosmic magnifying lenses distort view of distant galaxies

Looking deep into space, and literally peering back in time, is like experiencing the universe in a house of mirrors where everything is distorted through a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. Gravitational lensing occurs ...

Light bending by a black hole may offer proof of extra dimensions

(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania report that a new test for measuring the ability of gravity to bend light seen from distant stars around large objects like black holes may offer proof of the ...

Growing galaxies gently

The first galaxies formed before the Universe was less than one billion years old and were much smaller than the giant systems -- including the Milky Way -- that we see today. So somehow the average galaxy size has increased ...

page 7 from 40