Category Astronomy/Space

Black holes are notorious for gobbling up everything that comes their way, but astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have discovered that even supermassive black holes can be picky eaters, and this can have a significant impact on their growth.

This discovery, now published in The Astrophysical Journal, was made by an international team of astronomers led by Makoto A. Johnstone, a Ph.D. candidate with the University of Virginia. The team used ALMA to study seven nearby galaxy mergers hosting supermassive black holes separated by only a few thousand light-years.

How galaxy mergers affect black holes
When two massive, gas-rich galaxies merge, gravity drives vast amounts of cold molecular gas toward the centers of both systems, where supermassive ...

Starlight and stardust are not enough to drive the powerful winds of giant stars, transporting the building blocks of life through our galaxy. That’s the conclusion of a new study from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, of red giant star R Doradus. The result overturns a long-held idea about how the atoms needed for life are spread.

The study, “An empirical view of the extended atmosphere and inner envelope of the asymptotic giant branch star R Doradus II...

How common are Earth-like planets in the universe? When I started working on supernova explosions, I never imagined that my research would eventually lead me to ask a question about the origin of Earth-like planets. Yet that is exactly where it brought me.

For decades, planetary scientists have believed that the early solar system was enriched with short-lived radioactive elements—such as aluminum-26—by a nearby supernova...

The cosmos has served up a gift for a group of scientists who have been searching for one of the most elusive phenomena in the night sky. Their study, presented in Science Advances, reports on the very first observations of a swirling vortex in spacetime caused by a rapidly rotating black hole.

The process, known as Lense-Thirring precession or frame-dragging, describes how black holes twist the spacetime that surrounds them, dragging nearby objects like stars and wobbling their orbits along the way.

Discovery of ...