Something strange is afoot in the galaxy known as 1ES 1927+654: In late 2017, and for reasons that scientists couldn't explain, the supermassive black hole sitting at the heart of this galaxy underwent a massive identity ...
Astronomy
May 5, 2022
5
1109
Scattered across our Milky Way galaxy are tens of millions of black holes—immensely strong gravitational wells of spacetime, from which infalling matter, and even light, can never escape. Black holes are dark by definition, ...
Astronomy
May 2, 2022
1
550
Using the AstroSat spacecraft, Indian astronomers have observed a soft X-ray transient known as MAXI J0637−430. Results of the study, published February 18 on the arXiv pre-print repository, deliver essential information ...
Researchers from the U.S. Naval Observatory and elsewhere have performed simultaneous observations of an active galactic nucleus (AGN) in the galaxy NGC 2992 using the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and NASA's Swift spacecraft. ...
Using NASA's Chandra spacecraft, astronomers have performed high-resolution X-ray spectroscopic observations of a transient black hole X-ray binary known as GRS 1915+105. They report that the source exhibits a variable magnetic ...
Using data from the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite, astronomers from the Florida Institute of Technology have discovered a quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) in the galaxy NGC 4945. The finding, reported in a ...
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
28
944
When a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole, tidal forces tear it apart, producing a bright flare of radiation as material from the star falls into the black hole. Astronomers study the light from these "tidal ...
Astronomy
Aug 26, 2020
2
514
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 ...
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 ...
Astronomy
Apr 8, 2020
52
7708
