supermassive black holes tagged posts

False color image of Cassiopeia A using Hubble and Spitzer telescopes and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

An international team of scientists has found evidence of a series of massive supernova explosions near our solar system, which showered Earth with radioactive debris. The scientists found radioactive iron-60 in sediment and crust samples taken from the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The iron-60 was concentrated in a period between 3.2 and 1.7 million years ago, which is relatively recent in astronomical terms.

“We were very surprised that there was debris clearly spread across 1.5 million years,” said Dr Wallner, a nuclear physicist in the ANU Research School of Physics and Engineering. “It suggests there were a series of supernovae, one after another...

A sky survey image of the massive galaxy NGC 1600, and a Hubble Space Telescope closeup of the bright center of the galaxy where the 17-billion-solar-mass black hole — or binary black hole — resides. Credit: ESA/Hubble image courtesy of STScI.

A near-record 17-billion-sun supermassive black hole discovered in a sparse area of the local universe indicates these monster objects may be more common than once thought. Until now, the biggest supermassive black holes – those with masses ~10 billion times that of our sun – have been found at the cores of very large galaxies in regions loaded with other large galaxies. The current record holder, discovered in the Coma Cluster tips the scale at 21 billion solar masses and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The newly discovered black ho...

Slices of collapsing gas within dark matter halos on three different spacial scales: from 10,0000 to 10 light years across. The colors represent the gas density, from low density (blue color) to much larger density (red color). The gas on the smallest spatial scales is going to form a supermassive black hole. Credit: Isaac Shlosman, University of Kentucky

Often containing more than a billion times the mass than our Sun, supermassive black holes have perplexed humans for decades. But new research by astrophysicist Isaac Shlosman and collaborators will help to understand the physical processes, providing details of how supermassive black holes formed 13 billion years ago...

This image shows the elliptical galaxy NGC 4889 in front of hundreds of background galaxies, and deeply embedded within the Coma galaxy cluster. Well-hidden from human eyes, there is a gigantic supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. Credit: NASA & ESA

The placid appearance of NGC 4889 can fool the unsuspecting observer. But the elliptical galaxy harbours one of the most supermassive black holes ever discovered. Located ~300 million light-years away in the Coma Cluster, the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 4889, the brightest and largest galaxy in this image has a black hole that is 21 billion times the mass of the Sun. The event horizon has a diameter of ~130 billion kilometres. This is about 15X the diameter of Neptune’s orbit from the Sun...