X-rays tagged posts

Watching X-rays flung out into the universe by the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy 800 million light-years away, Stanford University astrophysicist Dan Wilkins noticed an intriguing pattern. He observed a series of bright flares of X-rays—exciting, but not unprecedented—and then, the telescopes recorded something unexpected: additional flashes of X-rays that were smaller, later and of different “colors” than the bright flares.

According to theory, these luminous echoes were consistent with X-rays reflected from behind the black hole—but even a basic understanding of black holes tells us that is a strange place for light to come from.

“Any light that goes into that black hole doesn’t come out, so we shouldn’t be able to see anythin...

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Astronomers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) and CSIRO have just observed bizarre, never-seen-before behavior from a radio-loud magnetar—a rare type of neutron star and one of the strongest magnets in the universe.

Their new findings, published today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), suggest magnetars have more complex magnetic fields than previously thought, which may challenge theories of how they are born and evolve over time.

Magnetars are a rare type of rotating neutron star with some of the most powerful magnetic fields in the universe...

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Astronomers at ANU have found the fastest-growing black hole known in the Universe, describing it as a monster that devours a mass equivalent to our sun every two days. The astronomers have looked back more than 12 billion years to the early dark ages of the Universe, when this supermassive black hole was estimated to be the size of about 20 billion suns with a 1% growth rate every one million years.

“This black hole is growing so rapidly that it’s shining thousands of times more brightly than an entire galaxy, due to all of the gases it sucks in daily that cause lots of friction and heat,” said Dr Wolf from the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophys...

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Findings have implications on evolution of massive stars. Observations revealed that the unusually large magnetosphere around an O-type star NGC 1624-2 contains a raging storm of extreme stellar winds and dense plasma that gobbles up X-rays before they can escape into space. Florida Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Véronique Petit and team may help scientists better understand the lifecycle of certain massive stars, which are essential for creating metals needed for the formation of other stars and planets.

The massive O-type star – the hottest and brightest type of star in the univers...

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