On February 11, astronomers saw a distant flash of light that seemed to come from a source as bright as a quadrillion suns. They alerted other scientists to the event, and several telescopes quickly pivoted to focus on the flash. Now, two teams of researchers have identified its source: a black...
galaxies
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Astronomers have compiled 15 years’ worth of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey into an interactive map of the observable universe. Read...
Scientists have discovered a relatively small black hole lurking next to a star in the constellation Ophiuchus, about 1,600 light-years away. It’s now the closest-known back hole to Earth. Read...
The Cygnus X-1 system is one of the brightest sources of X-rays in the Milky Way, consisting of a black hole called Cygnus X-1 and its giant companion, a star packing 41 times the mass of our Sun. Researchers recently measured the polarization of those X-rays to better understand the geometry of...
The hits keep coming from Webb Space Telescope, which has now spotted a rainbow “knot” consisting of an extremely red quasar and a snarl of massive galaxies that existed about 11.5 billion years ago. Read...
Space is unrelenting in its expanse and grandeur; in the observable universe alone we’ve imaged billions of objects, but so many remain unexamined. Over the last 10 years, the Dark Energy Camera alone has imaged about 2.5 billion objects, such as galaxies, stars, dwarf planets, and supernovae,...
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is being circled by a bubble of hot gas, according to recent analysis by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration. The gas is whipping around the black hole at about 30% the speed of light. Read...
Just when we begin to forget about the old Hubble Space Telescope, it comes back with another amazing look at the cosmos. It’s most recent target? Two spiral galaxies, more than a billion light-years from Earth, that appear to be colliding. Read...
Webb’s latest image release is a special collab with the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists combined data from the two observatories to produce these spectacular shots of the spiral Phantom Galaxy (also known as Messier 74), about 32 million light-years from Earth. Read...
On a clear night, it’s possible to see our entire galactic neighborhood from Earth. You need the right conditions: very little light (which is why so few stars are visible in cities), and it’s ideal to be high up, so that there’s not much atmosphere getting in the way of your view. Recently,...
The fuzzy, bright-orange trappings of a cosmic beast that lurks in the heart of our galaxy made quite the impact today on scientists and space nerds alike. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released its first image the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius...
The fuzzy, bright-orange trappings of a cosmic beast that lurks in the heart of our galaxy made quite the impact today on scientists and space nerds alike. The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration released its first image the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius...
The Event Horizon Collaboration, the group behind the first-ever image of a black hole, just achieved another huge accomplishment: an image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. This is a breakthrough in our understanding of our home galaxy and the astrophysics of its...
A new video from NASA shows what it looks like when a star is caught in the powerful gravity of a black hole. In these binary systems, the doomed stars spin around the black holes, which steadily suck up gas from them. The visualization illustrates the variety of these parasitic partnerships in...
A new video from NASA shows what it looks like when a star is caught in the powerful gravity of a black hole. In these binary systems, the doomed stars spin around the black holes, which steadily suck up gas from them. The visualization illustrates the variety of these parasitic partnerships in...
A new video from NASA shows what it looks like when a star is caught in the powerful gravity of a black hole. In these binary systems, the doomed stars spin around the black holes, which steadily suck up gas from them. The visualization illustrates the variety of these parasitic partnerships in...
A new video from NASA shows what it looks like when a star is caught in the powerful gravity of a black hole. In these binary systems, the doomed stars spin around the black holes, which steadily suck up gas from them. The visualization illustrates the variety of these parasitic partnerships in...
A team of astronomers recently observed an askew black hole just 10,000 light-years from Earth. The black hole’s spin axis is out of alignment with the plane of debris orbiting it by at least 40 degrees, the most extreme misalignment of its kind yet seen by astronomers. Read...
There Are 40,000,000,000,000,000,000+ Black Holes in the Observable Universe, Says New Estimate
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A team of astrophysicists has calculated the number of stellar-mass black holes in the observable universe to be 40 quintillion, accounting for 1% of the total ordinary matter in the universe. Read...
There Are 40,000,000,000,000,000,000+ Black Holes in the Observable Universe, Says New Estimate
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A team of astrophysicists has calculated the number of stellar-mass black holes in the observable universe to be 40 quintillion, accounting for 1% of the total ordinary matter in the universe. Read...
There Are 40,000,000,000,000,000,000+ Black Holes in the Observable Universe, Says New Estimate
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A team of astrophysicists has calculated the number of stellar-mass black holes in the observable universe to be 40 quintillion, accounting for 1% of the total ordinary matter in the universe. Read...
Through a standard telescope, the nearby galaxy NGC 7727 looks like a gossamer tumbleweed drifting in the night sky. But within it are two supermassive black holes locked in a dance that will end with their violent merger. As a team of astronomers recently found, these objects are closer to Earth...
Through a standard telescope, the nearby galaxy NGC 7727 looks like a gossamer tumbleweed drifting in the night sky. But within it are two supermassive black holes locked in a dance that will end with their violent merger. As a team of astronomers recently found, these objects are closer to Earth...
The presence of two previously undetected galaxies some 29 billion light years away suggests our understanding of the early universe is upsettingly deficient. Read...
Hubble Space Telescope Takes Another Look at ‘Weird’ Galaxy That Seems to Lack Dark Matter
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In 2018, a team of astronomers reported that a galaxy appeared to have no dark matter, the invisible, mysterious stuff that is known only from its gravitational effects. The team’s work was met with skepticism, but now, they’ve doubled-down on the hypothesis after additional observations of...
A team of Japanese astronomers recently peered way, way back in time using a telescope array in Chile. What they made out in the distant, early universe is a record-breaking galaxy, one that turns back the clock on when galaxies took on their classic spiral structures. Read...
In May 2019, astronomers witnessed a bright flare coming from the center of our galaxy. The event was caused by matter accreting to our local black hole, a 4.6-million-solar-mass monster named Sagittarius A*. The cause of the flaring was unknown, though one researcher now says enigmatic...
Two years ago, astronomers acquired the first direct image of a black hole. A coordinated observation campaign of this object is now adding to our understanding of this black hole and its tumultuous surroundings. Read...
In April 2019, the world was spellbound, if only for a moment, by an ominous void encircled by a half-halo of light. It was the first direct image of a black hole; more specifically, a supermassive gravitational abyss at the core of Messier 87, a galaxy in the constellation Virgo some 54 million...
Some 230 million light-years from Earth, there’s a black hole going places. These extraordinarily dense objects are usually found sitting at the center of a galaxy violently gobbling up matter, so it was a surprise when astronomers spotted this one moving out of step with its resident galaxy.Read...