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    supermassive black hole tagged posts

    A New Light on Stellar Death

    December 13, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    An artist's depiction of a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded the rotating leftovers of a star that was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

    An artist’s depiction of a rapidly spinning supermassive black hole surrounded the rotating leftovers of a star that was ripped apart by the tidal forces of the black hole. Credit: ESO, ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

    Astronomers illuminate the role rapidly spinning black holes play in tidal disruption events. Back in 2015 when astronomers discovered an intense flare in a distant galaxy, they considered it the brightest supernova ever observed. Now, UC Santa Barbara astrophysicists and a group of international colleagues offer an entirely different interpretation based on new astronomical observation data from the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO), a global robotic telescope network, and the Hubble Space Telescope.

    The new information indicates that the event, called ASASSN-15lh, is actually a tidal...

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    Milky Way had a Blowout Bash 6 million years ago

    August 29, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

    Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

    The center of the Milky Way galaxy is currently a quiet place where a supermassive black hole slumbers, only occasionally slurping small sips of hydrogen gas. But it wasn’t always this way. A new study shows that 6 million years ago, when the first human ancestors known as hominins walked the Earth, our galaxy’s core blazed forth furiously. The evidence for this active phase came from a search for the galaxy’s missing mass.

    Measurements show that the Milky Way galaxy weighs about 1-2 trillion times as much as our Sun. About 5/6 of that is in the form of dark matter. The remaining 1/6 of our galaxy’s heft, or 150-300 billion solar masses, is normal matter...

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    ALMA finds a Swirling, Cool Jet that Reveals a Growing, Supermassive Black Hole

    July 4, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Alma's close-up view of the centre of galaxy NGC 1377 (upper left) reveals a swirling jet. In this colour-coded image, reddish gas clouds are moving away from us, bluish clouds towards us, relative to the galaxy's centre. The Alma image shows light with wavelength around one millimetre from molecules of carbon monoxide (CO). A cartoon view (lower right) shows how these clouds are moving, this time seen from the side. The background colour image of NGC 1377 and its surroundings is a composite made from a visible light images taken at the CTIO 1.5-metre telescope in Chile by H. Roussel et al. (2006) (V filter; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006ApJ...646..841R), and in filters r and i by ESO's VLT Survey Telescope [VST] Credit: CTIO/H. Roussel et al./ESO (left panel); Alma/ESO/NRAO/S. Aalto (top right panel); S. Aalto (lower right panel)

    Alma’s close-up view of the centre of galaxy NGC 1377 (upper left) reveals a swirling jet. In this colour-coded image, reddish gas clouds are moving away from us, bluish clouds towards us, relative to the galaxy’s centre. The Alma image shows light with wavelength around one millimetre from molecules of carbon monoxide (CO). A cartoon view (lower right) shows how these clouds are moving, this time seen from the side. The background colour image of NGC 1377 and its surroundings is a composite made from a visible light images taken at the CTIO 1.5-metre telescope in Chile by H. Roussel et al. (2006) (V filter; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006ApJ…646..841R), and in filters r and i by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope [VST] Credit: CTIO/H. Roussel et al./ESO (left panel); Alma/ESO/NRAO/S...

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    Gravitational Lens Zooms in on why some Quasars have the Radio turned down

    July 3, 2016, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Reconstruction of the lensed radio-quiet quasar HS0810+2554 after removing the effects of the lensing. Right: the data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array showing what the source looks like after passage through the lensing galaxy. The images are not to scale - the lensed image appears to be many times larger in the sky than the actual size of the source. Credit: N Jackson/NRAO

    Reconstruction of the lensed radio-quiet quasar HS0810+2554 after removing the effects of the lensing. Right: the data from the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array showing what the source looks like after passage through the lensing galaxy. The images are not to scale – the lensed image appears to be many times larger in the sky than the actual size of the source. Credit: N Jackson/NRAO

    Mini-jets of material ejected from a central supermassive black hole appear to be the culprits behind faint radio wave emissions in ‘radio-quiet’ quasars. A study of gravitationally-lensed images of 4 radio-quiet quasars has revealed the structure of these distant galaxies in unprecedented detail...

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