Black holes and high winds bad news for galaxies

A supermassive black hole with x-ray emission emanating from its inner region (pink) and ultrafast winds (light purple lines) streaming from the surrounding disk.

Credit: ESA

For the first time, astronomers have measured winds associated with a black hole and found they blast along at a quarter of the speed of light. Andrew Masterson reports.

As in humans, it seems, so in deep space. After consuming large amounts at high speed, hot gas needs to be expelled.

New measurements from NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) have measured the speed, intensity and volatility of ultra-fast streams of hot gas that periodically blast out from close by supermassive black holes.

Read more:

https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/black-holes-and-high-winds-bad-news-for-galaxies

SOURCES OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES: THE MOST VIOLENT EVENTS IN THE UNIVERSE

 10 Feb , 2016 by Markus Pössel

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Soon, very soon, Thursday, February 11, at 10:30 Eastern time, we are likely to learn at any one of several press conferences – at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., in Hannover, Germany, near Pisa in Italy and elswhere – that gravitational waves have been measured directly, for the first time. This would mean the first direct detection of minute distortions of spacetime, travelling at the speed of light, first postulated by Albert Einstein almost exactly 100 years ago.

Time to brush up on your gravitational wave basics: In Gravitational waves and how they distort space, we had a look at what gravitational waves do. InGravitational wave detectors: How they work we saw how you can measuregravitational waves. Third and final step: What are typical gravitational wave sources? How are these waves produced?

Astronomers detect enormous ‘invisible’ structures moving 50km per second across the Milky Way

Astronomers have detected what appear to be enormous ‘invisible’ structures located 3,000 light-years from us and moving 50km per second across the Milky Way

Photo credit: Shown is a still from an animation of the lensing effect produced by the structures. Keith Bannister (CSIRO)/Artem Tuntsov (Manly Astrophysics)

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Astronomers have discovered invisible structures lurking in the interstellar space in the Milky Way. Although previously, researchers speculated these invisible structures exist, the new study, published in the Journal Science will help astronomers contain their size and shape much better.

'Planet Nine' May Exist: New Evidence for Another World in Our Solar System

The mythical "Planet X" may actually be real, and scientists are calling it "Planet Nine."

Astronomers have found evidence for a planet 10 times more massive than Earth in the far outer solar system, orbiting about 20 times farther from the sun than distant Neptune does.

"This would be a real ninth planet," one of the researchers, Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, said in a statement. "There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting." [Evidence Mounts for Existence of 'Planet X' (Video)]

This potential "Planet Nine" has not yet been observed. But Brown and his colleague, Konstantin Batygin, also of Caltech, are inferring its likely existence based on modeling work and the weird orbits of a number of small objects in the faraway Kuiper Belt, which lies beyond Neptune.

Specifically, six Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) cruise around the sun on elliptical paths that all point in the same direction, even though the bodies are moving at different speeds. In addition, the six KBOs' orbits all share the same tilt — roughly 30 degrees downward, relative to the plane of the eight officially recognized planets. (Pluto, which was the ninth planet until its 2006 reclassification by the International Astronomical Union, zips around the sun in a different plane.)

The odds of this latter phenomenon occurring by chance alone are about 0.007 percent, researchers said.

"Basically, it shouldn't happen randomly," Brown said. "So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits."

READ MORE: 'Planet Nine' May Exist: New Evidence for Another World in Our Solar System

Newly discovered supernova most powerful stellar explosion ever seen

PHOTO: An artist's impression of the super-luminous supernova ASASSN-15lh as it would appear from an exoplanet located about 10,000 light-years from the blast. (Beijing Planetarium/Jin Ma)

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Astronomers have detected the most powerful stellar explosion ever seen — a massive supernova, twice as powerful as anything previously recorded.

Giant Planet Sized Diamond Found Floating in Space

Work-experience schoolboy discovers a new planet

June 10, 2015

Source: Keele University

Summary: A 15-yr-old schoolboy has discovered a new planet orbiting a star 1000 light years away in our galaxy. The student was doing a work-experience project when he spotted the planet by finding a tiny dip in the light of a star as a planet passed in front of it.

An artist's impression of Tom's planet, WASP-142b, orbiting its star, WASP-142. The planet is depicted as seen from a hypothetical moon. A second, dimmer star is seen in the background. Being 1000 light years away, the planet is too distant to obtain a direct image.

Credit: David A. Hardy. http://www.astroart.org/

A 15-yr-old schoolboy has discovered a new planet orbiting a star 1000 light years away in our galaxy. Tom Wagg was doing work-experience at Keele University when he spotted the planet by finding a tiny dip in the light of a star as a planet passed in front of it.

Hunt for Dwarf Planet Ceres' Mysterious Water Begins

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Ceres rotates in this sped-up movie comprised of images taken by NASA's Dawn mission during its approach to the dwarf planet. The images were taken on Feb. 19, 2015, from a distance of nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers). Dawn observed Ceres for a full rotation of the dwarf planet, which lasts about nine hours. The images have a resolution of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) per pixel.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is about to make its second and final stop during its exploration of the asteroid belt and it is already returning some stunning images that are creating more questions than answers.

After leaving massive asteroid Vesta’s orbit in 2012, Dawn has traveled through the asteroid belt that occupies the region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter to rendezvous with 600 mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres — the first spacecraft ever to orbit two celestial bodies during its mission.

VIDEO: Pluto Flyby and Black Holes: Top Space Events for 2015

Black hole 12bn times more massive than sun is discovered

Scientists name new ‘object’ SDSS J0100+2802 and say it is 12.8bn light years from Earth and was formed just 900m years after the Big Bang

 

Artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a distant quasar. Scientists believe they have discovered one whose mass is 12 billion times that of our sun’s. 

Photograph: Zhaoyu Li/Shanghai Astronomical/Peking University/PA

A monster black hole powering “the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe” has been discovered that is 12bn times more massive than the sun, scientists have revealed.

The extraordinary object is at the centre of a quasar - an intensely powerful galactic radiation source - with a million billion times the sun’s energy output.