torus tagged posts

Black holes with varying light signatures but that were thought to be the same objects being viewed from different angles are actually in different stages of the life cycle, according to a study led by Dartmouth researchers.

The research on black holes known as “active galactic nuclei,” or AGNs, says that it definitively shows the need to revise the widely used “unified model of AGN” that characterizes supermassive black holes as all having the same properties.

The study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, provides answers to a nagging space mystery and should allow researchers to create more pre...

Shockwave of Supernova 1987A as it slammed into debris that ringed the original star before its demise. Credit: Yvette Cendes, Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto

Astronomers have observed the aftermath of Supernova 1987A over a 25-year period, from 1992 to 2017. Since it first appeared in the southern night sky on February 24th 1987, Supernova 1987A has been one of the most studied objects in the history of astronomy.

The supernova was the cataclysmic death of a blue supergiant star, some 168,000 light-years from Earth, in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own Milky Way Galaxy. It was the brightest supernova to appear in our skies since Kepler’s Supernova in 1604 and the first since the invention of the telescope.

The brilliant new star...