supermassive black holes tagged posts

NGC 7674, seen just above the center, is a luminous spiral galaxy with a powerful active nucleus. Credit: NASA, ESA, the Hubble Heritage Team

A study using multiple radio telescopes confirms that supermassive black holes found in the centers of galaxies can form gravitationally bound pairs when galaxies merge. “The dual black hole we found has the smallest separation of any so far detected through direct imaging,” said David Merritt, professor of physics at Rochester Institute of Technology The supermassive black holes are located in the spiral galaxy NGC 7674, ~400 million light years from earth, and are separated by a distance less than one light year...

This is a quasar growing under intense accretion streams.
Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory

A new computer simulation helps explain the existence of puzzling supermassive black holes observed in the early universe. The simulation is based on a computer code used to understand the coupling of radiation and certain materials. “Supermassive black holes have a speed limit that governs how fast and how large they can grow,” said Joseph Smidt of the Theoretical Design Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, “The relatively recent discovery of supermassive black holes in the early

development of the universe raised a fundamental question, how did they get so big so fast?”

Using computer codes developed at Los Alamos for modeling the interaction of matter and radiation related to the Lab’s...

Artist illustration depicting the record breaking “tidal disruption event” (TDE). The red shows hotter material that falls toward the black hole and generates a distinct X-ray flare. The blue shows a wind blowing from the infalling material. Credit: CXC/M. Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/UNH/D. Lin et al, Optical: CFHT

A giant black hole ripped apart a nearby star and then continued to feed off its remains for close to a decade, according to research led by the University of New Hampshire. This black hole meal is more than 10X longer than any other previous episode of a star’s death. “We have witnessed a star’s spectacular and prolonged demise,” said Dacheng Lin, a research scientist at UNH’s Space Science Center...