Category Astronomy/Space

Using the Wisconsin H-Alpha Mapper telescope, astronomers have for the first time measured the Fermi Bubbles in the visible light spectrum. The Fermi Bubbles are two enormous outflows of high-energy gas that emanate from the Milky Way and the finding refines our understanding of the properties of these mysterious blobs.

The research team from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Whitewater...

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) play a major role in galaxy evolution. Astronomers from SRON and RuG have now used a record-setting sample of galaxies to confirm that galaxy mergers have a positive effect on igniting AGNs. They were able to compile about 10 times more pictures of merging galaxies than previous studies by using a machine-learning algorithm.

One of the bigger questions in astronomy is how galaxies evolve from clouds of gas and dust to the beautiful spiral structures observed in our galactic neighborhood. So-called active galactic nuclei (AGNs) comprise interesting research objects to answer part of the question, because there appears to be co-evolution between AGNs and galaxies...

Astronomers have caught a black hole hurling hot material into space at close to the speed of light. This flare-up was captured in a new movie from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The black hole and its companion star make up a system called MAXI J1820+070, located in our galaxy about 10,000 light years from Earth. The black hole in MAXI J1820+070 has a mass about eight times that of the sun, identifying it as a so-called stellar-mass black hole, formed by the destruction of a massive star. (This is in contrast to supermassive black holes that contain millions or billions of times the sun’s mass.)

The companion star orbiting the black hole has about half the mass of the sun...

Giant planets in our solar system and circling other stars have exotic clouds unlike anything on Earth, and the gas giants orbiting close to their stars—so-called hot Jupiters—boast the most extreme.

A team of astronomers from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom have now come up with a model that predicts which of the many types of proposed clouds, from sapphire to smoggy methane haze, to expect on hot Jupiters of different temperatures, up to thousands of degrees Kelvin.

Surprisingly, the most common type of cloud, expecte...