Category Astronomy/Space

This is NGC 1332, a galaxy with a black hole at its center whose mass has been measured at high precision by ALMA. Credit: Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey

Findings could help shed light on how galaxies and their supermassive black holes form. It’s about 660 million times as massive as our sun, and a cloud of gas circles it at about 1.1 million mph. This supermassive black hole sits at the center of a galaxy NGC 1332, 73 million light years from Earth. And an international team of scientists that includes Rutgers associate professor Andrew J. Baker has measured its mass with unprecedented accuracy with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

A black hole can form after matter, often from an exploding star, condenses via gravity...

On our star, the Sun, the sunspots are seen in a belt around the equator. Sunspots are cool areas caused by the strong magnetic fields where the flow of heat is slowed. Credit: NASA

The discovery by a physics doctoral student at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) of the 2nd-strongest merger shock in clusters of galaxies ever observed has generated excitement that is opening doors to further scientific exploration. Sarthak Dasadia discovered the very strong shock in the merging galaxy cluster Abell 655 using observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The shock to the north of this cluster is second in strength only to the Bullet Cluster shock.

A distant star has been seen to spin so fast that its magnetic field erupts from its poles rather than around its equator (marked i...

The RGB (Red Green Blue image) of the cluster. Red color shows optical radiation, Green shows Radio and Blue color shows X-rays emission. Credit: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

The discovery by a physics doctoral student at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) of the 2nd-strongest merger shock in clusters of galaxies ever observed has generated excitement that is opening doors to further scientific exploration. Sarthak Dasadia discovered the very strong shock in the merging galaxy cluster Abell 655 using observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. The shock to the north of this cluster is second in strength only to the Bullet Cluster shock.

The shock is traveling with an astonishing speed of 2,700km/s, 3X the local speed of sound in the cluster...

This is an artist’s conception of Planet Nine. Credit: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC)

Earlier this year scientists presented evidence for Planet Nine, a Neptune-mass planet in an elliptical orbit 10 times farther from our Sun than Pluto. Since then theorists have puzzled over how this planet could end up in such a distant orbit. New research by astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) examines a number of scenarios and finds that most of them have low probabilities. Therefore, the presence of Planet Nine remains a bit of a mystery.

“The evidence points to Planet Nine existing, but we can’t explain for certain how it was produced,” says CfA astronomer Gongjie Li...