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    supermassive black hole tagged posts

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

    April 11, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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

    April 3, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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

    January 10, 2019, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    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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    Trans-Galactic Streamers Feeding Most Luminous Galaxy in the Universe

    November 18, 2018, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Artist impression of W2246-0526, the most luminous known galaxy, and three companion galaxies. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

    Artist impression of W2246-0526, the most luminous known galaxy, and three companion galaxies. Credit: NRAO/AUI/NSF, S. Dagnello

    ALMA data show the most luminous galaxy in the universe has been caught in the act of stripping away nearly half the mass from at least three of its smaller neighbors. The light from this galaxy, known as W2246-0526, took 12.4 billion years to reach us, so we are seeing it as it was when our universe was only about a tenth of its present age.

    New observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/ submillimeter Array (ALMA) reveal distinct streamers of material being pulled from three smaller galaxies and flowing into the more massive galaxy, which was discovered in 2015 by NASA’s space-based Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)...

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