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Artist’s representation of a galaxy with a brilliant quasar at its centre NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI) Space-time, the so-called fabric of physical reality, may be made of tiny, discrete pieces stitched together. A preliminary analysis of the way matter orbits quasars suggests we could find evidence of this cosmic quilt in the universe’s […]
Stumped by Space ORCs ORCs are faint extragalactic circles of radio emission that appear to be invisible at other wavelengths. As the number of known ORCs slowly climbs, researchers have begun to test possible formation mechanisms. Among the many possibilities are the jets of active galactic nuclei: luminous galactic centers powered by accreting supermassive black […]
Stumped by Space ORCs ORCs are faint extragalactic circles of radio emission that appear to be invisible at other wavelengths. As the number of known ORCs slowly climbs, researchers have begun to test possible formation mechanisms. Among the many possibilities are the jets of active galactic nuclei: luminous galactic centers powered by accreting supermassive black […]
Astronomers have scoured decades-old data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, finding bright, lumpy features dotting a jet of energy spit out by a nearby black hole. Puzzlingly, the “knots” clock a faster speed when seen in X-rays than they do in radio wavelengths. scientists said. “The X-ray data traces a unique picture that you can’t […]
Sometimes, the best things come in threes. The system V404 Cygni is an old favorite with astronomers. The binary contains a 9-solar-mass black hole that’s slurping gas from a star slightly less massive than the Sun. Astronomically speaking, only a hair’s breath separates the pair: 0.14 astronomical unit, or less than half Mercury’s average distance […]
This artist’s illustration shows a disk of material (red, orange, and yellow) created after a supermassive black hole (depicted on the right) destroyed a star through intense tidal forces. After a few years, this disk expanded outward until it began intersecting another orbiting object — either a star or a small black hole — around […]
James Webb Space Telescope sees lonely supermassive black hole-powered quasars in the early universe
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have peered back 13 billion years to discover surprisingly lonely supermassive black hole-powered quasars. The James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) observations are confusing because isolated black holes should struggle to gather enough mass to reach supermassive status, especially just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. […]
Black hole mergers are beautiful — and some of the most violent events in the cosmos. Here’s how the process unfolds. The story begins with two black holes orbiting far from each other in long, lazy circles. They could have been born as a binary pair of stars, or they may have just randomly encountered […]
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A simulation of a black hole Hotaka Shiokawa/EHT General relativity teaches us that reality is, in some sense, a matter of perspective. Consider how someone who is “falling” into a black hole sees something completely different to an observer trying to watch that someone cross the event horizon, a black hole’s edge. The person actually […]