When they are active, supermassive black holes play a crucial role in the way galaxies evolve. Until now, growth was thought to be triggered by the violent collision of two galaxies followed by their merger; however, new ...
Astronomy
Mar 5, 2024
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Using archival data from the Gemini North telescope, a team of astronomers has measured the heaviest pair of supermassive black holes ever found. The merging of two supermassive black holes is a phenomenon that has long been ...
Astronomy
Feb 29, 2024
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175
Cataclysmic events happen in the universe all the time. Black hole mergers, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, and a whole host of others. Most of them happen in distant galaxies, so they pose no threat to us. But there are a ...
Astronomy
Oct 24, 2023
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Galaxy Cruise, a citizen science project led by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), has been sailing the cosmic ocean with citizen astronomers to uncover the secrets of galaxies since 2019.
Astronomy
Oct 10, 2023
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34
In 2009 a giant star 25 times more massive than the sun simply vanished. OK, it wasn't quite that simple. It underwent a period of brightening, increasing in luminosity to a million suns, just as if it was ready to explode ...
Astronomy
Oct 4, 2023
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28
Last year, Northwestern University researchers reported new observational evidence that long gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can result from the merger of a neutron star with another compact object (either another neutron star or ...
Astronomy
Aug 31, 2023
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1124
A pair of astrophysicists at the Rochester Institute of Technology has found via simulations that some black holes might be traveling through space at nearly one-tenth the speed of light. In their study, reported in Physical ...
The first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015 has opened a new window on the universe, enabling in particular the observation of the merger of pairs of massive black holes. This young field of research has matured ...
Astronomy
Jun 6, 2023
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266
Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity describes how the fabric of space and time, or spacetime, is curved in response to mass. Our sun, for example, warps space around us such that planet Earth rolls around the sun ...
Astronomy
May 25, 2023
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443
While studying a nearby pair of merging galaxies using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—an international observatory co-operated by the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Radio Astronomy ...
Astronomy
Jan 9, 2023
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