Strange gamma-ray heartbeat puzzles scientists

Scientists have detected a mysterious gamma-ray heartbeat coming from a cosmic gas cloud. The inconspicuous cloud in the constellation Aquila is beating with the rhythm of a neighboring precessing black hole, indicating a ...

Variability of blazar 3C 273 examined by astronomers

Using data from space observatories and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have investigated variability of a blazar known as 3C 273. The new study, presented in a paper published July 6 on the arXiv pre-print server, sheds ...

Galactic star formation and supermassive black hole masses

Astronomers studying how star formation evolved over cosmic time have discovered that quiescent galaxies (galaxies that are currently not making many new stars) frequently have active galactic nuclei. These AGN accrete material ...

ALMA spots twinkling heart of Milky Way

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 ...

Black hole bends light back on itself

You may have heard that nothing escapes the gravitational grasp of a black hole, not even light. This is true in the immediate vicinity of a black hole, but a bit farther out—in disks of material that swirl around some ...

Astrophysicists wear 3-D glasses to watch quasars

A team of researchers from Russia and Greece reports a way to determine the origins and nature of quasar light by its polarization. The new approach is analogous to the way cinema glasses produce a 3-D image by feeding each ...

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