Category Astronomy/Space

An international team of astronomers has conducted a detailed kinematic study of a radio galaxy known as 3C 84. The research sheds more light on the properties of this source and its connection to gamma-ray emission. The study was detailed in a paper published April 7 on the arXiv pre-print repository.

Radio galaxies emit huge amounts of radio waves from their central cores. Black holes at the centers of these galaxies accrete gas and dust, generating high-energy jets visible in radio wavelengths, which accelerate electrically charged particles to high velocities.

Astronomers are especia...

Researchers report the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting the star GJ740, a red dwarf star situated some 36 light years from Earth. In recent years there has been an exhaustive study of red dwarf stars to find exoplanets in orbit around them. These stars have effective surface temperatures between 2400 and 3700 K (over 2000 degrees cooler than the Sun), and masses between 0.08 and 0.45 solar masses...

A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun’s mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas — called an accretion disk — that surrounds each one.

Viewed from near the orbital plane, each accretion disk takes ...

In April 2019, scientists released the first image of a black hole in galaxy M87 using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). However, that remarkable achievement was just the beginning of the science story to be told.

Data from 19 observatories released today promise to give unparalleled insight into this black hole and the system it powers, and to improve tests of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

“We knew that the first direct image of a black hole would be groundbreaking,” says Kazuhiro Hada of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, a co-author of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that describes the large set of data...