X-ray light tagged posts

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not as dormant as had been thought, a new study shows.

The slumbering giant woke up around 200 years ago to gobble up some nearby cosmic objects before going back to sleep, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

NASA’s IXPE space observatory spotted an Xray echo of this powerful resurgence of activity, the researchers said.

The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A—abbreviated to Sgr A—is four million times more massive than the Sun. It sits 27,000 light years from Earth at the center of the Milky Way’s spiral.

Last year astronomers revealed the first...

An illustration shows what happens in a typical experiment with SLAC’s LCLS X-ray laser, top, versus what happened in this study with an especially intense X-ray pulse. Normally the X-ray pulses — which are shown coming in from the right — scatter off electrons in a sample and produce a pattern in a detector. But when researchers cranked up the intensity of the X-ray pulses, the pulses seemed to go straight through the sample, as if it were not there, and the pattern in the detector vanished. Two recent papers describe and explain this surprising result, which is due to a ‘nonlinear’ effect where particles of X-ray light team up to cause unexpected things to happen. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

A nonlinear’ effect seemingly turns materials transparent is seen for the ...