Astronomers have detected a gravitational wave signal that appears to be caused by a black hole swallowing a neutron star. Aside from being an incredible cosmic cataclysm to witness, this detection is important for another reason: it may be the final point in the gravitational wave trifecta.
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Hubble has discovered a structure around a black hole thought to be impossible. A small, “malnourished” black hole has a disk of material circling it – a feature thought unique to supermassive black holes. This disc is also so close to the black hole that it’s distorting and stretching the light.
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We’re now getting new gravitational wave detections so often it almost doesn’t seem special anymore. Barely a month into a new observation run, the LIGO/Virgo collaboration has now reported five new events, including what may be the first ever detection of a black hole swallowing a neutron star.
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Many black holes have been found to spew jets of high-speed particles. Those usually form long, straight beams but now astronomers have discovered a weird black hole that’s spinning like a wonky top, firing off “bullets” of plasma in all directions.
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Astronomers have released what could be the historic first images of a supermassive black hole’s event horizon. The enormous black hole is located within the large galaxy M87, and was imaged by a network of powerful observatories that formed a single planet-sized virtual telescope.
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Active galactic nuclei are known by different names depending on the viewing angle. Now, for the first time astronomers have directly imaged the last piece of the puzzle that ties them all together – a dusty donut of material that surrounds a supermassive black hole.
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It's hard to really understand the large-scale structure of the Milky Way. Now, astronomers have peered towards the center of the galaxy using the ESA's X-ray telescope XMM-Newton, and discovered two colossal "chimneys" pumping huge amounts of energy and gas out into intergalactic space.
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A team of astronomers has managed to find the origin of an enormous star that is currently barreling out of the Milky Way having escaped from one of our galaxy’s spiral arms. The discovery challenges the theory that such stars come from the galactic center.
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Black holes tend to fall into two categories: fairly small or supermassive. It’s long been believed that there should be a middle class, and in recent years astronomers have found evidence of these “intermediate mass” black holes. Now a Japanese team has located one near the center of the Milky Way.
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A team of astronomers has used a global array of telescopes to peer through the fog and capture some of the clearest radio images yet of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. And it may indicate that the object just happens to be pointing directly at Earth.
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