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Astronomers have sighted a supermassive black hole traveling through space that appears to have been ejected from its host galaxy. Researchers observing the dwarf galaxy designated RCP 28, roughly 7.5 billion light years away from our solar system, noticed an aberrant streak of light via the Hubble telescope. The “streak” appears to be a collection of stars being dragged out of their home galaxy by the immense gravitational force of a black hole. The “runaway” black hole is the first of its kind to be observed, and appears to have been ejected from its original galaxy. “We found a thin...

The discovery offers the first observational evidence that supermassive black holes can be ejected from their home galaxies to roam interstellar space...The researchers discovered the runaway black hole as a bright streak of light while they were using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the dwarf galaxy RCP 28, located about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth.

Astronomers have spotted a runaway supermassive black hole, seemingly ejected from its home galaxy and racing through space with a chain of stars trailing in its wake. - snip - The researchers discovered the runaway black hole as a bright streak of light while they were using the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the dwarf galaxy RCP 28, located about 7.5 billion light-years from Earth. Follow-up observations showed that the streak measures more than 200,000 light-years long — roughly twice the width of the Milky Way — and is thought to be made of compressed gas that is actively forming...

Black holes are powerful cosmic reactors. They supply the energy for quasars and other active galactic nuclei (AGNs). This is due to the interplay between matter and its enormous gravitational and magnetic forces. A black hole technically lacks a magnetic field, but the dense plasma surrounding it as an accretion disc does possess a magnetic field. As plasma spirals around a black hole, the charged particles inside it create an electrical current and magnetic field. The direction of plasma flow does not spontaneously vary, hence the magnetic field is likely rather stable. Imagine the researchers’ amazement when they discovered evidence...

Star Spaghettification Black Hole - This animation depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a black hole during a ‘tidal disruption event’. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser Scientists hope to improve their understanding of the growth of supermassive black holes in massive galaxies by studying intermediate-mass black holes. After lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy, an intermediate-mass black hole revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. Known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, the violent shredding of the star produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar...

The discovery of a so-called monster black hole that has about 12 times the mass of the sun is detailed in a new Astrophysical Journal research submission, the lead author of which is Dr. Sukanya Chakrabarti, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). “It is closer to the sun than any other known black hole, at a distance of 1,550 light years,” says Dr. Chakrabarti, the Pei-Ling Chan Endowed Chair in the Department of Physics at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System. “So, it's practically in our backyard.” Black holes are seen as...

Astronomers have discovered a chaotic scene unlike any witnessed before in a cosmic "train wrecK" between giant galaxy clusters. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes revealed a dark matter core that was mostly devoid of galaxies, which may pose problems for current theories of dark matter behavior. Astronomers have discovered a chaotic scene unlike any witnessed before in a cosmic “train wreck” between giant galaxy clusters. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes revealed a dark matter core that was mostly devoid of galaxies, which may pose problems for current theories of dark matter behavior. "These results challenge our...

When the Swift Gamma Burst Mission spacecraft first detected the flash within the constellation Draco, astronomers thought it was a gamma-ray burst from a collapsing star. On March 31, however, UC Berkeley's Joshua Bloom sent out an email circular suggesting that it wasn't a typical gamma-ray burst at all, but a high-energy jet produced as a star about the size of our sun was shredded by a black hole a million times more massive. Careful analysis of the Swift data and subsequent observations by the Hubble Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory confirmed Bloom's initial insight. The details are...

Scientists have seen the afterglow of a gamma-ray burst just nine minutes after the explosion, a result of precision coordination and fast slewing of ground-based telescopes upon detection of the burst by NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE) satellite. The quick turnaround has so far allowed scientists to determine a minimum distance to the explosion, which likely marks the creation of a black hole. Results continue to pour in, as nearly 100 telescopes in 11 countries have tracked the burst. The burst was detected on Friday, Oct. 4, at 8:06 a.m. EDT. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory observed...

Explanation: Why would x-ray rings appear around a gamma-ray burst? The surprising answer has little to do with the explosion itself but rather with light reflected off areas of dust-laden gas in our own Milky Way Galaxy. GRB 221009A was a tremendous explosion -- a very bright gamma-ray burst (GRB) that occurred far across the universe with radiation just arriving in our Solar System last week. Since GRBs can also emit copious amounts of x-rays, a bright flash of x-rays arrived nearly simultaneously with the gamma-radiation. In this case, the X-rays also bounced off regions high in dust right here...

Astronomers have published a major finding: A black hole has been "burping" out energy from a small star it was observed shredding in 2018, after two years in which it didn't eject any such material. How unusual is this? "Super unusual," Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, tells NPR. "We've never really seen this before to this degree." Researchers made the discovery when they used a powerful radio telescope facility — the Very Large Array in New Mexico – to check in on some two dozen black holes...

Strange Long-Lasting Pulse of High-Energy Radiation Swept Over Earth Record Breaking Gamma Ray Burst Astronomers think GRB 221009A represents the birth of a new black hole formed within the heart of a collapsing star. In this illustration, the black hole drives powerful jets of particles traveling near the speed of light. The jets pierce through the star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays as they stream into space. Credit: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWildeNASA’s Swift and Fermi Missions Detect Exceptional Cosmic BlastAn unusually bright and long-lasting pulse of high-energy radiation swept over Earth Sunday, October 9, captivating astronomers around the world. The intense emission...

Periodically, these gravitational behemoths will devoir stars and other objects in their vicinity, releasing tremendous amounts of light and radiation. In October 2018, astronomers witnessed one such event when observing a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light-years from Earth....another team from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics noticed something unprecedented when they examined the same black hole three years later. As they explained in a recent study, the black hole was shining very brightly because it was ejecting...leftover material from the star at half the speed of light. [T]he team observed the outburst while revisiting data...

1.) How did the Universe begin? What “type” of inflation occurred? What preceded and/or caused inflation? 2.) What explains neutrino mass? Are neutrinos Dirac or Majorana particles? Are there heavy, sterile neutrino species? 3.) Why is our Universe matter-dominated? More matter than antimatter permeates the Universe. 4.) What is dark matter? Its effects are understood, not its underlying cause. 5.) What is dark energy? Its properties indicate a constant, positive spatial energy density.

Nasa With the recent release of fascinating images coming out of the James Webb Telescope, there’s been a renewed public interest in deep space. In a new post, NASA Exoplanet, the branch responsible for searching for potential life-bearing worlds beyond our solar system, released the “actual sound” of a black hole. “The misconception that there is no sound in space originates because most space is a vacuum, providing no way for sound waves to travel,” NASA Exoplanets writes in the tweet. “A galaxy cluster has so much gas that we’ve picked up actual sound. Here it’s amplified, and mixed with...

Black Hole Police Spot Extragalactic Black Hole Using the Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered a stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own. A stellar-mass black hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbor galaxy to our own, has been found by a team of international experts, renowned for debunking several black hole discoveries. “For the first time, our team got together to report on a black hole discovery, instead of rejecting one,” says project leader Tomer Shenar. Furthermore, they discovered that the star that gave rise to the black hole vanished with...

Newton’s Theory of Gravity explains most large-scale events fairly well. ... However, the theory is not foolproof. Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, for example, explained data that Newton’s theory couldn’t. Scientists still use Newton’s theory because it works in the overwhelming majority of cases and has much simpler equations. Dark matter was proposed as a way to reconcile Newtonian physics with the data. But what if, instead of reconciliation, a modified theory is needed.... Mordehai Milgrom...developed a theory of gravity (called Modified Newtonian Dynamics or “Mond” for short) in 1982 that postulates gravity functions differently when it becomes...

A fiery-looking, red-orange energetic jet blasting bright light from the center of a galaxy. An artist's illustration of neutrinos originating from a high-energy Blazar Benjamin Amend, Clemson University Born in the cradle of deep space, blasting across the universe at nearly the speed of light and harnessing energy up to a million times greater than anything achieved by the world's most powerful particle accelerator, cosmic rays are atom fragments that relentlessly rain down on Earth. They get caught in our atmosphere and mess up our satellites. They threaten the health of astronauts living in orbit, even when sparse in number....

Our Milky Way galaxy is haunted. The vast gulf of space between the stars is plied by the dead, burned-out and crushed remnants of once glorious stars. These black holes cannot be directly seen because their intense gravity swallows light. Like legendary wandering ghosts, their presence can only be deduced by seeing how they affect the environment around them. Imagine crushing the mass of a fleet of battleships into something no bigger than a baseball. That only begins to describe the infinite density locked away into a black hole left over from a stellar explosion. The black hole is typically...

ASTROPHYSICS A team of University of Copenhagen astrophysicists has arrived at a major result regarding star populations beyond the Milky Way. The result could change our understanding of a wide range of astronomical phenomena, including the formation of black holes, supernovae and why galaxies die. The Andromeda galaxy, our Milky Way's closest neighbor, is the most distant object in the sky that you can see with your unaided eye. For as long as humans have studied the heavens, how stars look in distant galaxies has been a mystery. In a study published today in The Astrophysical Journal, a team of...