Space Station Threshold

Working out the mass of huge black holes, like the ones hiding in the centre of galactic nuclei, is no easy task and attempts are being made to find novel ways to weigh them. Using data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, two scientists have confirmed a theory they conceived ten years ago, that the supermassive [...]

Astronomers now know that essentially every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. When the black hole is actively feeding on material, the surrounding region can blaze brightly - this is a quasar, aka an active galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope has been used to image a set of exotic active galaxies, known [...]

Our Milky Way's black hole is quiet - too quiet - some astronomers might say. But according to a team of Japanese astronomers, the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy might be just as active as those in other galaxies, it's just taking a little break. Their evidence? The echoes from a [...]

As galaxies merge together, you might be wondering what happens with the supermassive black holes that lurk at their centres. Just imagine the forces unleashed as two black holes with hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun come together. The answer will surprise you. Fortunately, it's an event that we should be [...]

Occasionally, stars minding their own business around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy get chucked out of the Milky Way, never to return. Fraser wrote about the discovery of two of these exiled stars, hurling away at the mind-blowing speed of over 1 million miles. A recent study of another shows [...]

Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe. Just a single quasar can blaze more than a hundred times more brightly than our entire Milky Way galaxy. It turns out, though, that some of the brightest quasars in the Universe are hidden, cloaked behind a shroud of gas and dust. But now researchers [...]

Some galaxies are relatively quiet, while others blaze with enough radiation that we can see them clear across the Universe. Astronomers now understand that these quasars are formed when the supermassive black holes at the heart of galaxies are actively feeding on material. But where does this material come from? What sets quasars off?