Category Astronomy/Space

Two black holes orbiting one another eventually will merge. A team of researchers from Purdue University and other institutions have discovered a supermassive black hole binary system, one of only two known such systems. The two black holes, which orbit each other, likely weigh 100 million suns each. One of the black holes powers a massive jet that moves outward at very close to the speed of light. The system is so far away that the visible light seen today was emitted 8.8 billion years ago.

The two are only between 200 AU and 2,000 AU apart (one AU is the di...

The Dragonfly telescope is undergoing a metamorphosis. For the past decade, the Dragonfly Telephoto Array — designed by Yale’s Pieter van Dokkum and the University of Toronto’s Roberto Abraham and located in New Mexico — has conducted groundbreaking science by detecting faint starlight within dimly lit parts of the night sky. The telescope uses clusters of telephoto lenses to create images, much the way a dragonfly’s eyes gather visual data.

The telescope has spotted previously unseen “fluffy” galaxies, diffuse dwarf galaxies, and galaxies with little or no dark m...

Experiments point the way to solving mystery that keeps clusters hot. Galaxies rarely live alone. Instead, dozens to thousands are drawn together by gravity, forming vast clusters that are the largest objects in the universe.

“Galaxy clusters are one of the most awe-inspiring things in the universe,” said Prof. Emeritus Don Lamb, a University of Chicago astrophysicist and co-author on a new paper published March 9 – one that may point the way towards solving a decades-long mystery.

Scientists have long known that the hydrogen gas in galaxy clusters is searingly hot – about 10 million degrees Kelvin, or roughly t...

Researchers provide the first plausible explanation to why one of the most massive black hole pairs observed to date by gravitational waves also seemed to merge on a non-circular orbit. Their suggested solution, now published in Nature, involves a chaotic triple drama inside a giant disk of gas around a super massive black hole in a galaxy far, far away.

Black holes are one of the most fascinating objects in the Universe, but our knowledge of them is still limited — especi...