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(The Hubble Space Telescope captured this image of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo. Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage.) Shining so brightly that they eclipse the ancient galaxies that contain them, quasars are distant objects powered by black holes a billion times as massive as our...

New York- “We all know that the planet has a fever. But now it turns out that it is far worse than we could ever have imagined. This fever is contagious. It has traversed the great darkness of space. It has traveled the unfathomable distance of 450 miles to settle on the surface of sun. It has now infected earth’s nearest neighbor. And if we don’t do something about it within ten years all of the sun’s solar ice caps will have melted and she will no longer be able to sustain the myriads of plant and animal lives that...

Universe's most energetic particles point to huge black holesThe most energetic particles in the universe – ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays – likely come from supermassive black holes in the hearts of nearby active galaxies, says a study by scientists from nearly 90 research institutions worldwide, including the University of Utah. “We discovered the sources of the highest energy particles in the universe,” says Miguel Mostafa, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Utah and one of 370 scientists and engineers belonging to a 17-nation collaboration that operates the $54 million Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. “The sources are the...