For more information about supermassive black hole check the Wikipedia article here
Early galaxies were very different from those we see today – it was overgrown black holes, and not stars that lit them up, claims a new study; in it, it is suggested that these obese black holes were numerous and bright enough that we should be able to detect them now, billions of years [...]
Thu, Apr 4, 2013
This is the first post in a series about types of galaxies; today, we’ll be finding out more about Seyfert galaxies. This galactic type has been described for the first time by Carl K. Seyfert in 1943, who noted that their central regions have peculiar spectra with notable emission lines. Basically, what makes them special [...]
Wed, Apr 3, 2013
In an unexpected discovery, astronomers have surprised a supermassive black hole that had been dormant for the past decades “waking up” and feasting upon an unsuspecting planet that had drifted too close to its event horizon. The mass of the planet hints towards a giant Jupiter or a small brown dwarf. Also, a similar event [...]
Thu, Feb 28, 2013
Astronomers have made the first accurate measurement of a supermassive black hole’s spin, providing new insights that might help scientists probe the mysteries the surround them. Supermassive black holes have an incredibly huge gravitational pull that doesn’t let anything in its surroundings escape its hungry maw, be it dust, rock or even light. Some are [...]
Thu, Nov 8, 2012
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 [...]
Fri, Nov 2, 2012
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 [...]
Thu, Oct 25, 2012
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 [...]
Thu, Oct 25, 2012
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 [...]
Fri, Sep 28, 2012
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 [...]
Sat, Aug 4, 2012
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 [...]
Wed, Feb 22, 2012
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. [...]
Thu, Jan 19, 2012
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 [...]
Mon, Oct 31, 2011
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 [...]
Thu, Jun 30, 2011
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 [...]
Sat, May 7, 2011
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 [...]
Sat, Apr 9, 2011
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 [...]
Wed, Nov 10, 2010
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 [...]
Mon, Jul 27, 2009
This is a wicked one for sure! Basically, nobody really knows what’s going on there, except for the fact that it probably involves a supermassive black hole. The whole picture seems to be rather a Dali painting of an eye, as the red-in-infrared spiral wraps around the smaller blue companion galaxy. The pink lighting you [...]
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Fri, Jun 7, 2013
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