supermassive black hole tagged posts

Cool, Nebulous Ring around Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

ALMA image of the disk of cool hydrogen gas flowing around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. The colors represent the motion of the gas relative to Earth: the red portion is moving away, so the radio waves detected by ALMA are slightly stretched, or shifted, to the ‘redder’ portion of the spectrum; the blue color represents gas moving toward Earth, so the radio waves are slightly scrunched, or shifted, to the ‘bluer’ portion of the spectrum. Crosshairs indicate location of black hole.
Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), E.M. Murchikova; NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

New ALMA observations reveal a never-before-seen disk of cool, interstellar gas wrapped around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way...

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Working together as a ‘Virtual Telescope,’ observatories around the world produce 1st Direct Images of a Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow.
Credit: EHT Collaboration

Images reveal supermassive black hole at the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy. An international team of over 200 astronomers, including scientists from MIT’s Haystack Observatory, has captured the first direct images of a black hole...

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VLA makes 1st Direct Image of Key Feature of Powerful Radio Galaxies

Artist’s conception of the dusty, doughnut-shaped object surrounding the supermassive black hole, disk of material orbiting the black hole, and jets of material ejected by the disk, at the center of a galaxy.
Credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF

Structure suggested by theorists decades ago. Astronomers used the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to make the first direct image of a dusty, doughnut-shaped feature surrounding the supermassive black hole at the core of one of the most powerful radio galaxies in the Universe – a feature first postulated by theorists nearly four decades ago as an essential part of such objects.

The scientists studied Cygnus A, a galaxy some 760 million light-years from Earth. The galaxy harbors a black hole 2...

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X-ray Pulse detected near Event Horizon as Black Hole Devours Star

This artist’s impression shows hot gas orbiting in a disk around a rapidly-spinning black hole. The elongated spot depicts an X-ray-bright region in the disk, which allows the spin of the black hole to be estimated.
Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

Pulse pattern suggests distant black hole must be spinning at least at 50% the speed of light. On Nov. 22, 2014, astronomers spotted a rare event in the night sky: A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy, nearly 300 million light years from Earth, ripping apart a passing star. The event, known as a tidal disruption flare, for the black hole’s massive tidal pull that tears a star apart, created a burst of X-ray activity near the center of the galaxy...

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