active galactic nucleus tagged posts

A massive black hole at the heart of a galaxy in the Virgo constellation is waking up, shooting out intense Xray flares at regular intervals that have puzzled scientists, a study said Friday.

Astronomers previously had little reason to pay any attention to galaxy SDSS1335+0728, which is 300 million light years from Earth.

But in 2019, the galaxy suddenly started shining with a brightness that turned some telescopes its way.

Then in February last year, Chilean astronomers started noticing regular bursts of X-rays coming from the galaxy.

This was a sign that the galaxy’s sleeping black hole was waking from its slumber, ...

Using NASA’s SOFIA telescope, researchers have found CQ 4479, a galaxy which never had been closely studied before, to be generating new stars in spite of a luminous AGN at the galaxy’s center. Researchers from the University of Kansas have described a galaxy more than 5.25 billion light years away undergoing a rarely seen stage in its galactic lifecycle. Their findings recently were published in the Astrophysical Journal.

The galaxy, dubbed CQ 4479, shows characteristics that normally don’t coexist: an X-ray luminous active galactic nuclei (AGN) and a cold gas supply fueling high star formation rates.

“Massive galaxies, such as our own Milky Way, host a supermassive black hole at their hearts — these are black holes that grow by accreting interstellar gas onto themselves to bec...

2XMM J14345J0.5+033843 lies nearly 400 million light-years away from Earth. It is a Seyfert galaxy that is dominated by something known as an Active Galactic Nucleus — its core is thought to contain a supermassive black hole that is emitting huge amounts of radiation, pouring energetic X-rays out into the universe. The other fuzzy object in the frame was named in the same way — it is a bright galaxy named 2XMM J143448.3+033749.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Not all galaxies have the luxury of possessing a simple moniker or quirky nickname. This impressive galaxy imaged by Hubble is one of the unlucky ones, and goes by a name that looks more like a password for a computer: 2XMM J143450.5+033843...

This artist’s concept shows what the young, dead, disk galaxy MACS2129-1, right, would look like when compared with the Milky Way galaxy, left. Although three times as massive as the Milky Way, it is only half the size. MACS2129-1 is also spinning more than twice as fast as the Milky Way. Note that regions of Milky Way are blue from bursts of star formation, while the young, dead galaxy is yellow, signifying an older star population and no new star birth. Credit: NASA, ESA, and Z. Levy (STScI)

By combining the power of a “natural lens” in space with the capability of Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers made a surprising discovery – the first example of a compact yet massive, fast-spinning, disk-shaped galaxy that stopped making stars only a few billion years after the big bang...