supermassive black hole tagged posts

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...

Observations by the NSF’s Jansky Very Large Array, pictured here, show that a suspected fast radio burst afterglow is actually radio emission from an active galactic nucleus. Credit: NRAO

Last Feb a team of astronomers reported detecting an afterglow from a mysterious event called a fast radio burst, which would pinpoint the precise position of the burst’s origin, a longstanding goal in studies of these mysterious events. These findings were quickly called into question by follow-up observations. New research by Harvard astronomers Peter Williams and Edo Berger shows that the radio emission believed to be an afterglow actually originated from a distant galaxy’s core and was unassociated with the fast radio burst.

“Part of the scientific process is investigating findings to see if they hold...

Artist’s illustration of turbulent winds of gas swirling around a black hole. Some of the gas is spiraling inward, but some is being blown away.

New research led by astrophysicists at York University has revealed the fastest winds ever seen at UV wavelengths near a supermassive black hole. “We’re talking wind speeds of 20% the speed of light, which is more than 200 million kilometres an hour. That’s equivalent to a category 77 hurricane,” says Jesse Rogerson, York U. “And we have reason to believe that there are quasar winds that are even faster.”

Astronomers have known about the existence of quasar winds since the late 1960s. At least 1 in 4 quasars have them...