black hole – आवारा मुसाफिर

Is this the brightest object in the universe!

February 20, 2024550 Views

Astronomers have discovered what may be the brightest object in the universe, a quasar with a black hole at its heart growing so fast that it swallows the equivalent of a sun a day. Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have characterised a bright quasar, finding it to be not only the brightest of its kind, but also the most luminous object ever observed. Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies and they are powered by supermassive black holes. The black hole in this record-breaking quasar is growing in mass by the equivalent of one Sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole to date. The record-breaking quasar shines 500 trillion times brighter than our sun. The black hole powering this distant quasar is more than ...

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First direct image of a black hole expelling a powerful jet

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

April 28, 20231193 Views

For the first time, astronomers have observed, in the same image, the shadow of the black hole at the centre of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) and the powerful jet expelled from it. The observations were done in 2018 with telescopes from the Global Millimetre VLBI Array (GMVA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which ESO is a partner, and the Greenland Telescope (GLT). Thanks to this new image, astronomers can better understand how black holes can launch such energetic jets. This image shows the jet and shadow of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy together for the first time. This image gives scientists the context needed to understand how the powerful jet is formed. The new observations also revealed that the black hole’s ring, shown here in the inse...

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Hubble finds hungry black hole twisting captured star into donut shape

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January 15, 2023815 Views

Black holes are gatherers, not hunters. They lie in wait until a hapless star wanders by. When the star gets close enough, the black hole's gravitational grasp violently rips it apart and sloppily devours its gasses while belching out intense radiation. Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have recorded a star's final moments in detail as it gets gobbled up by a black hole. These are termed "tidal disruption events." But the wording belies the complex, raw violence of a black hole encounter. There is a balance between the black hole's gravity pulling in star stuff, and radiation blowing material out. In other words, black holes are messy eaters. Astronomers are using Hubble to find out the details of what happens when a wayward star plunges into the gravitational abyss. ...

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Distant black hole is caught in the act of annihilating a star

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December 1, 2022647 Views

Astronomers have detected an act of extreme violence more than halfway across the known universe as a black hole shreds a star that wandered too close to this celestial savage. But this was no ordinary instance of a ravenous black hole. It was one of only four examples - and the first since 2011 - of a black hole observed in the act of tearing apart a passing star in what is called a tidal disruption event and then launching luminous jets of high-energy particles in opposite directions into space, researchers said. And it was both the furthest and brightest such event on record. This undated artist’s impression illustrates how it might look when a star approaches too close to a black hole, where the star is squeezed by the intense gravitational pull of the black hole. Some of the st...

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Closest known black hole to Earth spotted by astronomers

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November 5, 2022197 Views

Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, just 1,600 light-years away. Scientists reported Friday that this black hole is 10 times more massive than our sun. And it’s three times closer than the previous record-holder. It was identified by observing the motion of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at about the same distance as Earth orbits the sun. The black hole was initially identified using the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, said Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Astronomers using the International Gemini Observatory, operated by NSF’s NOIRLab, have discovered the closest-known black hole to Earth. Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/Spaceengine/M. Zamani El-Badr...

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Black Hole spews out material years after shredding star

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October 14, 2022509 Views

Scientists say, no one has ever seen anything like this before In October 2018, a small star was ripped to shreds when it wandered too close to a black hole in a galaxy located 665 million light years away from Earth. Though it may sound thrilling, the event did not come as a surprise to astronomers who occasionally witness these violent incidents while scanning the night sky. But nearly three years after the massacre, the same black hole is lighting up the skies again — and it hasn’t swallowed anything new, scientists say. “This caught us completely by surprise — no one has ever seen anything like this before,” says Yvette Cendes, a research associate at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and lead author of a new study analyzing the phenomenon. Arti...

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Scientists find an exotic black hole deemed a ‘needle in a haystack’

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July 19, 2022232 Views

Astronomers have spotted in a galaxy adjacent to our Milky Way what they are calling a cosmic "needle in a haystack" - a black hole that not only is classified as dormant but appears to have been born without the explosion of a dying star. Researchers said on Monday this one differs from all other known black holes in that it is "X-ray quiet" - not emitting powerful X-ray radiation indicative of gobbling up nearby material with its strong gravitational pull - and that it was not born in a stellar blast called a supernova. This artist’s impression shows what the binary system VFTS 243 might look like if we were observing it up close. The system, which is located in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is composed of a hot, blue star with 25 times the Sun’s mass and a b...

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Astronomers reveal first image of the black hole at the heart of our galaxy

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May 12, 2022383 Views

Today, at simultaneous press conferences around the world, including at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) headquarters in Germany, astronomers have unveiled the first image of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. This result provides overwhelming evidence that the object is indeed a black hole and yields valuable clues about the workings of such giants, which are thought to reside at the centre of most galaxies. The image was produced by a global research team called the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration, using observations from a worldwide network of radio telescopes. The image is a long-anticipated look at the massive object that sits at the very centre of our galaxy. Scientists had previously seen stars orbiting around something invi...

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Black hole hunters cast gaze at center of the Milky Way galaxy

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May 10, 2022320 Views

Residing at the center of our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy is a beast - a supermassive black hole possessing 4 million times the mass of our sun and consuming any material including gas, dust and stars straying within its immense gravitational pull. Scientists have been using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a global network of observatories working collectively to observe radio sources associated with black holes, to study this Milky Way denizen and have set an announcement for Thursday that signals they may finally have secured an image of it. The black hole is called Sagittarius A*, or SgrA*. First image of a black hole, captured by scientists using Event Horizon Telescope observations of the center of the galaxy M87. The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the...

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Stellar ‘vampire’ finds love at first bite with companion star

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March 3, 2022789 Views

“Closest black hole” system found to contain no black hole Astronomers have gotten a good look at what happens when a "vampire" star sucks the outer layers of material from a companion star, stripping this "bitten" victim down to a mere stellar core. In 2020 a team led by European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomers reported the closest black hole to Earth, located just 1000 light-years away in the HR 6819 system. But the results of their study were contested by other researchers, including by an international team based at KU Leuven, Belgium. In a paper published on Wednesday, these two teams have united to report that there is in fact no black hole in HR 6819, which is instead a “vampire” two-star system in a rare and short-lived stage of its evolution. The original study on...