A starburst with the prospect of gravitational waves (Update)

In 1887, American astronomer Lewis Swift discovered a glowing cloud, or nebula, that turned out to be a small galaxy about 2.2 million light years from Earth. Today, it is known as the "starburst" galaxy IC 10, referring ...

Chandra peers into a nurturing cloud

In the context of space, the term 'cloud' can mean something rather different from the fluffy white collections of water in the sky or a way to store data or process information. Giant molecular clouds are vast cosmic objects, ...

Arp 299: Galactic Goulash

What would happen if you took two galaxies and mixed them together over millions of years? A new image including data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory reveals the cosmic culinary outcome.

Extended hard X-ray emission from a galactic nucleus

Supermassive black holes containing millions or even billions of solar masses of material are found at the nuclei of almost all galaxies. The Milky Way, for example, has a nuclear black hole with about 4 million solar masses ...

R Aquarii: Watching a volatile stellar relationship

In biology, "symbiosis" refers to two organisms that live close to and interact with one another. Astronomers have long studied a class of stars—called symbiotic stars—that co-exist in a similar way. Using data from NASA's ...

Early black holes may have grown in fits and spurts

A long-standing question in astrophysics is: how and when did supermassive black holes appear and grow in the early universe? New research using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) suggests ...

Obscured supermassive black holes in galaxies

Most if not all galaxies are thought to host a supermassive black hole in their nuclei. It grows by accreting mass, and while feeding it is not hidden from our view: it generates X-ray emission and ultraviolet that heats ...

Astronomers pursue renegade supermassive black hole

Supermassive holes are generally stationary objects, sitting at the centers of most galaxies. However, using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes, astronomers recently hunted down what could be ...

Observatories combine to crack open the Crab Nebula

Astronomers have produced a highly detailed image of the Crab Nebula, by combining data from telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very ...

The arrhythmic beating of a black hole heart

At the center of the Centaurus galaxy cluster, there is a large elliptical galaxy called NGC 4696. Deeper still, there is a supermassive black hole buried within the core of this galaxy.

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