supermassive black hole tagged posts

NASA’s IXPE helps Solve Black Hole Jet mystery

This illustration shows NASA’s IXPE spacecraft, at right, observing blazar Markarian 501, at left. A blazar is a black hole surrounded by a disk of gas and dust with a bright jet of high-energy particles pointed toward Earth. The inset illustration shows high-energy particles in the jet (blue). When the particles hit the shock wave, depicted as a white bar, the particles become energized and emit X-rays as they accelerate. Moving away from the shock, they emit lower-energy light: first visible, then infrared, and radio waves. Farther from the shock, the magnetic field lines are more chaotic, causing more turbulence in the particle stream.
Credits: NASA/Pablo Garcia

Some of the brightest objects in the sky are called blazars...

Read More

Ready for its close-up: New Technology Sharpens Images of Black Holes

Credit: Broderick et al. 2022, ApJ, 935, 61

Using new computational algorithms, scientists have measured a sharp ring of light predicted to originate from photons whipping around the back of a supermassive black hole.

When scientists unveiled humanity’s historic first image of a black hole in 2019 — depicting a dark core encircled by a fiery aura of material falling toward it — they believed even richer imagery and insights were waiting to be teased out of the data.

Simulations predict that, obscured by that bright orange glow, there should exist a thin, bright ring of light created by photons flung around the back of the black hole by its intense gravity.

Now, a team of researchers has combined theoretical predictions and sophisticated imaging algorithms to “remaster” the ori...

Read More

Astronomers find Hidden Trove of Massive Black Holes

The newly discovered massive black holes reside in dwarf galaxies, where their radiation competes with the light of abundant young stars. (Original image by NASA & ESA/Hubble, artistic conception of black hole with jet by M. Polimera.)

Newfound black holes in dwarf galaxies shed light on the origin of our galaxy’s supermassive black hole. A team led by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found a previously overlooked treasure trove of massive black holes in dwarf galaxies. The newly discovered black holes offer a glimpse into the life story of the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.

As a giant spiral galaxy, the Milky Way is believed to have been built up from mergers of many smaller dwarf galaxies...

Read More

Astronomers find Largest Radio Galaxy ever

A joint radio-infrared view of Alcyoneus, a radio galaxy with a projected proper length of 5.0 megaparsecs. Researchers superimposed images from the LOFAR Two-meter Sky Survey (LoTSS), shown in orange, with images from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), shown in blue. (Image credit: Martijn Oei et al.)

By a stroke of luck, a team led by Dutch Ph.D. student Martijn Oei has discovered a radio galaxy of at least 16 million light-years long. The pair of plasma plumes is the largest structure made by a galaxy known thus far. The finding disproves some long-kept hypotheses about the growth of radio galaxies.

A supermassive black hole lurks in the center of many galaxies, which slows down the birth of new stars and therefore strongly influences the lifecycle of the galaxy as a...

Read More