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
A Spanish research team has obtained measurements for the innermost region of a disc of matter in orbital motion around a supermassive black hole in the quasar known as Einstein's Cross (Q2237-0305). It constitutes the most ...
Astronomy
Dec 23, 2015
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1734
The placid appearance of NGC 4889 can fool the unsuspecting observer. But the elliptical galaxy, pictured in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, harbours a dark secret. At its heart lurks one of the most ...
Astronomy
Feb 11, 2016
1
727
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
13
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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
5
3339
Using NASA's super-sensitive Chandra X-ray space telescope, a team of astronomers led by Q. Daniel Wang at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has solved a long-standing mystery about why most super massive black holes ...
Astronomy
Aug 29, 2013
23
0
An international team of astrophysicists, including Professor Phil Charles from the University of Southampton, have detected an intense wind from one of the closest known black holes to the Earth.
Astronomy
May 9, 2016
0
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