Scientists have long searched for proof of the decades-old theory that black holes surround the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy. By tweaking their approach just a little, astronomers have now turned up the first direct evidence that they do in fact exist.
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Black holes can be anywhere from a few times the mass of the Sun up to millions of times that, but some even bigger than that. A new study of data gathered by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope has found these so-called “ultramassive” black holes may be larger and more common than we thought.
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Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile have imaged a very active black hole at the center of spiral galaxy M77, which is apparently feasting on the universe’s largest donut.
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A newly released 360-degree video lets you explore the galactic center of the Milky Way from the perspective of the supermassive black hole at the heart of our galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).
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At a distance of about 13 billion lightyears, the most distant supermassive black hole known so far has been spotted. That incredible distance means it dates back to when the first stars blinked on, which raises the question of how a black hole that big arose so soon after the universe began.
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With intense gravity and radiation, the region around the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy was thought to be too harsh for star formation. But now almost a dozen young rebellious stars have been spotted there anyway, triggering a rethink of our understanding of how stars are born.
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The precise instruments at the LIGO and Virgo facilities were responsible for past detections of gravitational waves, but now astronomers plan to look for ripples from supermassive black hole collisions using natural detectors in space: pulsars, the “cosmic lighthouses” of the sky.
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Supermassive black holes lie at the center of most galaxies, but 750 million light-years away, 0402+379 boasts two of them – and one appears to be orbiting the other. The discovery is the result of 12 years of observation, marking the first time the phenomenon has been directly seen.
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Sometimes, like galactic bumper cars, galaxies smash into each other. When they do, the massive black holes at their centers usually behave a certain way. However, a merger of two galaxies observed by some NASA spaced-based tech shows that there's always an exception to the rule.
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A team of European astronomers says it has made the first confirmed observation of stars forming in the powerful outflow of material hurled out by a galaxy's central supermassive black hole.
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