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21 July 2010
First Quasar Gravitational Lens Discovered (w/video)
Gravitation lensing – a phenomenon that falls out of Einstein's theory of general relativity – has been observed numerous times, making for some fantastic images of rings, arcs and crosses composed of massive galaxies light years away. As the light from a background object is bent by gravity around a foreground object, multiple, magnified images [...]
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07 July 2010
Powerhouse Black Hole Blows a Huge Bubble
A relatively small black hole is producing tremendously powerful jets while creating a huge bubble of hot gas. Both the jets and the bubble are the largest ever seen, meaning this mini black hole is a powerhouse. But the most unusual feature of this remarkable black hole is not its energy output, but how it [...]
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24 June 2010
Radio Observations Provide New Explanation for Hanny's Voorwerp
Is Hanny's Voorwerp the result of a "light echo" of a violent event that happened long ago or perhaps is this mystifying blob of glowing gas being fueled by an ongoing, and current phenomenon? A just-released paper about the Voorwerp offers a new explanation for this perplexing, seemingly one-of-a-kind object in the constellation of Leo [...]
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01 June 2010
Retro Black Holes Are More Powerful
Black holes seem to defy our comprehension and be contrary to conventional understanding, so perhaps it is not entirely surprising that to find that supermassive black holes that have a retrograde or backwards spin might be more powerful and produce more ferocious jets of gas. While this new finding goes against what astronomers had [...]
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27 May 2010
Andromeda's Unstable Black Hole
The Andromeda galaxy, the closest spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way, has a supermassive black hole at the center of it much like other galaxies. Because of its proximity to us, Andromeda – or M31 – is an excellent place to study just how the supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies consume [...]
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27 May 2010
Black Hole in M87 Wanders using Jetpack
The elliptical galaxy M87 is known for a jet of radiation that is streaming from the supermassive black hole (SMBH) that the galaxy houses. This jet, which is visible through large-aperture telescopes, may have functioned as a black hole 'jetpack', moving the SMBH from the center of mass of the galaxy – where most SMBHs [...]
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26 May 2010
Galaxy Mergers Make Black Holes 'Light Up'
Only about 1% of supermassive black holes emit large amounts of energy, and astronomers have wondered for decades why so few exhibit this behavior. Data from Swift satellite, which normally studies gamma ray bursts, has allowed scientists to confirm that black holes "light up" when galaxies collide, and the data may offer insight into [...]
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11 May 2010
Black Hole Gets Kicked Out of Galaxy
Supermassive black holes are thought to lie at the center of most large galaxies. But off in a distant remote galaxy, astronomers have possibly found a giant black hole that appears to be in the process of being expelled from the galaxy at high speed. This newly-discovered object was found by Marianne Heida, a [...]
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07 April 2010
Is Our Universe Inside Another Larger Universe?
A wormhole is a hypothetical "tunnel" connecting two different points in spacetime, and in theory, at each end of the wormhole there could be two universes. Theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski from Indiana University has taken things a step further by proposing that perhaps our universe could be located within the interior of a wormhole [...]
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04 April 2010
Andromeda's Double Nucleus – Explained at Last?
In 1993, the Hubble Space Telescope snapped a close-up of the nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy, M31, and found that it is double. In the 15+ years since, dozens of papers have been written about it, with titles like The stellar population of the decoupled nucleus in M 31, Accretion Processes in the Nucleus of M31, [...]
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22 March 2010
Astronomers Find Black Holes Do Not Absorb Dark Matter
There's the common notion that black holes suck in everything in the nearby vicinity by exerting a strong gravitational influence on the matter, energy, and space surrounding them. But astronomers have found that the dark matter around black holes might be a different story. Somehow dark matter resists 'assimilation' into a black hole. (...)Read [...]
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17 March 2010
Spitzer Spies Earliest Black Holes
The Spitzer Space Telescope has found what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. "We have found what are likely first-generation quasars, born in a dust-free medium and at the earliest stages of evolution," said Linhua Jiang of the University of Arizona, Tucson, lead author of a [...]
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11 March 2010
World-wide Campaign Sheds New Light on Nature's "LHC"
In a manner somewhat like the formation of an alliance to defeat Darth Vader's Death Star, more than a decade ago astronomers formed the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope consortium to understand Nature's Death Ray Gun (a.k.a. blazars). And contrary to its at-death's-door sounding name, the GASP has proved crucial to unraveling the secrets of how [...]
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15 February 2010
Supermassive Black Holes Spinning Backwards Create Death Ray Jets?
Why do some of the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei create back-to-back jets that can vaporize entire solar systems, while others have no jets at all? Dan Evans, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) thinks he knows why; it's because the jet-producing supermassive black holes are spinning [...]
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15 February 2010
Can a Really, Really Fast Spacecraft Turn Into A Black Hole?
This question was posed in an Astronomy Cast episode a while back. It offers an interesting thought experiment, although a reasonably definitive answer to the question can be arrived at.(...)Read the rest of Can a Really, Really Fast Spacecraft Turn Into A Black Hole? (452 words) © Steve Nerlich for Universe Today, 2010. | Permalink | No comment [...]
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