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As far as black holes go, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way is pretty boring. It emits about the same energy as the sun, despite being 4 million times more massive. Sagittarius A* Astronomers have observed that about once a day, the black hole awakes, emitting a brief […]
I gotta say, sometimes it absolutely baffles me to see the kind of complex studies astrophysicists do, and this is definitely one of them. The light from the first stars in the Universe is still lingering around in the cosmos, and researchers have found a new way to capture it: using ultra-bright galaxies that act […]
Though this might sound like an oxymoron, this is possible the best term to describe one of the most interesting recent astronomical finds – the lowest mass supermassive black hole discovered so far. The black hole was detected at the center of a late-spiral galaxy, which astronomers at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory initially believed it […]
The European Southern Observatory has captured and analyzed an image of the center of our galaxy which, if printed at normal resolution, would measure 9 x 7 meters. The enormous 9 gigapixel image features the very center of the Milky Way and was created not to be a background for huge screens, but to help […]
At the center of most galaxies lie black holes, some of which are classed as supermassive black holes. These cosmic bodies can have a mass billions of times greater than that of the sun, crammed in just a fraction of the latter. Gravity goes completely haywire in such an environment where this humongous mass gets crushed […]
Stars suffer, too, you know. Astronomers have recently discovered a distinctive X-ray signal coming from a star on the verge of being engulfed by a black hole in a distant galaxy. “This tell-tale signal, called a quasi-periodic oscillation or QPO, is a characteristic feature of the accretion disks that often surround the most compact objects […]
Astronomers at NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory have come across a true astronomical oddity at the outskirts of the Milky Way, a stellar-mass black hole which exerts the fastest winds ever observed so far in its class – so fast that it rivals those blown by supermassive black holes, which often are billion times more massive. […]
Black Holes are the least understood entities, so far, in the Universe. However, if there’s one thing scientists know for sure about them, it’s that they’re the most extreme environment in cosmos. Black Holes have such a powerful, relentless gravity pull that it swallows absolutely everything in its vicinity, even light gets absorbed with zero […]
Black holes are perhaps the most fascinating and staggering objects in the known Universe, and we are just now beginning to uncover their secrets. Dr. Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester and his team found that doughnut-shaped dust shrouds that cover about half of supermassive black holes may very well be the result of […]
Astronomers have discovered the most distant quasar known so far, dubbed ULAS J1120+0641, powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass 2 billion times that of our sun – it’s also the brightest object in the known Universe. At a redshift of 7.1, placing it at only 770 million years after the Big Bang, the newly discovered […]
It’s still unclear if it was all about a stellar meal or if it was simply gas, or some other relatively unimportant phenomena that awoken the sleeping giant, but for the first time, astronomers have observed the awakening of a sleeping supermassive black hole. The sleeping giant It appeared to be a day just like […]
The Draco constellation (which is Latin for Dragon) is located at about 3.8 billion light years from Earth; just like every dragon that has at least some common sense, it breathes fire, especially after carelessly eating a nearby star. Rewind. A mysterious cosmic blast in the Draco constellation is causing waves that continue to […]
Researchers have confirmed the presence of a previously undiscovered structure located in the center of the Milky Way, a discovery likened with the discovery of a new continent on Earth, in terms of scale. Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who discovered the structure using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray […]