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    Black Hole at the Center of a Galaxy in the Early Universe received Less Mass Influx than expected, astronomers find

    January 31, 2024, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    Reddish vortex seen from from the side above with a bright centre and a thin ray protruding vertically from the plane
    Cosmic powerhouse: Artist’s impression of a quasar whose core region was literally set in motion in the early universe. While galaxies often merged with each other at that time, large amounts of matter were thrown into the centres of the galaxies. When matter orbits the supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy, energy is released, which explains the enormous brightness of an active galaxy. The quasar can therefore still be observed from a great distance today.
    © ESO / M. Kornmesser

    With the upgraded GRAVITY-instrument at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer of the European Southern Observatory, a team of astronomers led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has determined the mass of a black hole in a galaxy only 2 billion years after the Big Bang...

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    Mysterious Neptune Dark Spot detected from Earth for the first time

    August 28, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    There are four telescopic images of the planet Neptune side-by-side. The rightmost one is an almost-featureless cyan disc with a faint dark spot to the upper-right. The other three, coloured in blue, green and red, show higher contrast views of dark and bright spots, as well as bands crossing the planet diagonally.

    Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with an unexpected smaller bright spot adjacent to it. This is the first time a dark spot on the planet has ever been observed with a telescope on Earth. These occasional features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, and the new results provide further clues as to their nature and origin.

    Large spots are common features in the atmospheres of giant planets, the most famous being Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. On Neptune, a dark spot was first discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989, before disappearing a few years later...

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    Red alert: Massive Stars Sound Warning they are about to go Supernova

    October 17, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This artist’s impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. Credit: European Southern Observatory/L. Calçada Licence type Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

    Astronomers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Montpellier have devised an ‘early warning’ system to sound the alert when a massive star is about ...

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    Most Distant Quasar with Powerful Radio Jets discovered

    March 9, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

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    With the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered and studied in detail the most distant source of radio emission known to date. The source is a “radio-loud” quasar — a bright object with powerful jets emitting at radio wavelengths — that is so far away its light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The discovery could provide important clues to help astronomers understand the early Universe.

    With the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered and studied in detail the most distant source of radio emission known to date...

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