Twitter
RSS
Showing posts with label black holes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label black holes. Show all posts

NASA Approves X-ray Space Mission

Posted by Esse-Jay | Posted in , , , | Posted on 12:32
0
NASA recently confirmed that the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, mission will launch in August 2011. NuSTAR will carry the first high-energy X-ray focusing telescopes into orbit, providing a much deeper, clearer view of energetic phenomena such as black holes and supernova explosions than any previous instrument has provided in this region of the electromagnetic spectrum. 




              **Centaurus A (also known as NGC 5128) is a lenticular galaxy about 14 million light-years away in the   constellation Centaurus. It is one of the closest radio galaxies to Earth**

NuSTAR is a NASA Small Explorer mission led by Caltech, managed by JPL, and implemented by an international team of scientists and engineers. Fiona Harrison, a professor of physics and astronomy at Caltech, is the team's principal investigator. The official confirmation follows two years of detailed design and reviews that have enabled NASA to determine that the NuSTAR team is ready to build the flight hardware. For more information is online at www.nustar.caltech.edu.


Source: JPL

Bookmark and Share

Continue Reading

The Milky Way's Look Alike

Posted by Esse-Jay | Posted in , , | Posted on 22:46
0
A new image from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals an edge-on galaxy much like our own Milky Way.
 


**Seen edge-on, NGC 4945 appears much like our own Milky Way Galaxy. Sites of active star formation – HII regions – appear pink in this image. The field of view is 30 x 30 arcminutes; north is up and east is left. Image: ESO**

Taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) instrument on the 2.2 metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, the image of NGC 4945 reveals a spiral galaxy with swirling arms and a bar shaped central region resembling our home galaxy the Milky Way. But NGC 4945 has a brighter centre that likely hosts a supermassive black hole which is gorging on stellar matter and burping energy out into space. 


Astronomers classify NGC 4945 as a Seyfert galaxy, after American astronomer Carl Seyfert, who first identified this family of galaxies – a subclass of active galactic nuclei – to have curious light signatures emanating from their central engines. These emissions come from gas and dust falling into a disc around the black hole, which accelerates and heats it up until it emits high energy radiation such as X-rays and ultraviolet light. Most large spiral galaxies, including the Milky Way, host a black hole in their cores, though many of these monsters are at a stage of their lives where they no longer actively feed.

NGC 4945 resides 13 million light years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurs, and can be seen in modest amateur telescopes. It appears cigar-shaped from our perspective but it is actually many times wider than it is thick, with bands of stars and glowing gas marching around its centre. With the use of special optical filters to isolate the colour of light emitted by heated gases such as hydrogen, the new image from ESO displays sharp contrasts in NGC 4945 that indicate active areas of star formation. 
 

Source: AstronomyNow


Bookmark and Share

Continue Reading

New Galaxy with Most Distant Supermassive Black Hole

Posted by Esse-Jay | Posted in , , , , | Posted on 15:58
0

University of Hawaii astronomer Tomotsugu Goto and colleagues have discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant black hole ever found. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun.

** False-color image of the QSO (CFHQSJ2329-301), the most distant black hole currently known. In addition to the bright central black hole (white), the image shows the surrounding host galaxy (red). Tomotsugu Goto, University of Hawaii**

"It is surprising that such a giant galaxy existed when the universe was only one-sixteenth of its present age, and that it hosted a black hole one billion times more massive than the Sun," Goto said. "The galaxy and black hole must have formed very rapidly in the early universe."

Knowledge of the host galaxies of supermassive black holes is important to understand the long-standing mystery of how galaxies and black holes have evolved together. Until now, studying host galaxies in the distant universe has been extremely difficult because the blinding bright light from the vicinity of the black hole makes it more difficult to see the already faint light from the host galaxy.

Unlike smaller black holes, which form when a large star dies, the origin of supermassive black holes remains an unsolved problem. A currently favored model requires several intermediate black holes to merge. The host galaxy discovered in this work provides a reservoir of such intermediate black holes. After forming, supermassive black holes often continue to grow because their gravity draws in matter from surrounding objects. The energy released in this process accounts for the bright light that these black holes produce.
To see the supermassive black hole, the team of scientists used new red-sensitive CCDs installed in the Suprime-Cam camera on the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea. Satoshi Miyazaki of the National Astronomy Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) is lead investigator for the creation of the new CCDs and a collaborator on this project. "The improved sensitivity of the new CCDs has brought an exciting discovery as its very first result," Miyazaki said

A careful analysis of the colors revealed that 40 percent of light around 9100 angstroms is from the host galaxy itself and 60 percent is from the surrounding ionized nebulae illuminated by the black hole.

"We have witnessed a supermassive black hole and its host galaxy forming together," said Yousuke Utsumi from the Graduate University for Advanced Studies/NAOJ and a member of the project team. "This discovery has opened a new window for investigating galaxy-black hole co-evolution at the dawn of the universe."

 Source: Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa's Institute


Bookmark and Share

Continue Reading

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)