Black holes get a bad rap in popular culture for swallowing everything in their environments. In reality, stars, gas and dust can orbit black holes for long periods of time, until a major disruption pushes the material in.
Astronomy
May 10, 2017
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The newly refurbished cameras of the H.E.S.S. gamma-ray telescopes in Namibia have detected their first signals from a cosmic particle accelerator: The new cameras recorded Markarian 421 as their first target, a well-known ...
Astronomy
Feb 28, 2017
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Members of the Sternberg Astronomical Institute of the Lomonosov Moscow State University have been studying changes in the appearance of emissions from around the supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy called NGC ...
Astronomy
Feb 22, 2017
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(Phys.org)—Astronomers have spotted a mysterious faint object in the vicinity of a quadruply lensed quasar designated MG 0414+0534. The object, which was discovered using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array ...
Monster black holes sometimes lurk behind gas and dust, hiding from the gaze of most telescopes. But they give themselves away when material they feed on emits high-energy X-rays that NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic ...
Astronomy
Jan 8, 2017
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Cygnus A is an elliptical galaxy around 600 million light years from the Earth, which has a supermassive black hole at its centre. It is one of the brightest sources of radio waves in the sky and was featured in Contact, ...
Astronomy
Jul 27, 2016
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Last February a team of astronomers reported detecting an afterglow from a mysterious event called a fast radio burst, which would pinpoint the precise position of the burst's origin, a longstanding goal in studies of these ...
Astronomy
Apr 4, 2016
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NGC 4639 is a beautiful example of a type of galaxy known as a barred spiral. It lies over 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo and is one of about 1,500 galaxies that make up the Virgo Cluster.
Astronomy
Oct 19, 2015
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The central supermassive black hole of a recently discovered galaxy is far larger than should be possible, according to current theories of galactic evolution. New work, carried out by astronomers at Keele University and ...
Astronomy
Sep 24, 2015
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Active galactic nuclei are the brightest objects in the universe. They are not lit up permanently, but rather 'flicker' extremely slowly. This insight helps ETH researchers better understand the influence these nuclei and ...
Astronomy
Jun 24, 2015
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