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Today, supermassive black holes and their host galaxies tell a specific story in terms of mass. But JWST reveals a different story early on. primordial black holes The overdense regions that the Universe was born with grow and grow over time, but are limited in their growth by both the initial small sizes of the overdensities and also by the presence of radiation that's still energetic, which prevents structure from growing any faster. It takes tens-to-hundreds of millions of years to form the first stars; clumps of matter exist long before that, however, and some may directly collapse to form...

Three supermassive black holes found lurking in one galaxy NGC 6240 is a well-studied example of a galaxy merger. But the discovery that it hides three supermassive black holes makes it a stunning example of a galaxy formed through a triple merger. By Alison Klesman  |  Published: Friday, November 22, 2019 RELATED TOPICS: BLACK HOLES | GALAXIES The strange galaxy NGC 6240 is an ultra-rare example of a galaxy harboring three supermassive black holes near its core. Astronomers already knew of the galaxy's active, northern black hole (N), but thanks to cutting-edge 3D-mapping techniques, they've now identified two more —...

The heart of every major galaxy is said to contain a supermassive black hole — a place where anything, including light, can be devoured to the point of no return. For years, scientists have struggled to capture one of these deadly masses on camera, since the absence of light renders them nearly impossible to see. Now, for the first time, a group of scientists from the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project are expected to unveil a photograph of a black hole to the public.

Mysterious Filament is Stretching Down Towards the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole Article written: 23 Dec , 2017 by Matt Williams The core of the Milky Way Galaxy has always been a source of mystery and fascination to astronomers. This is due in part to the fact that our Solar System is embedded within the disk of the Milky Way – the flattened region that extends outwards from the core. This has made seeing into the bulge at the center of our galaxy rather difficult. Nevertheless, what we’ve been able to learn over the years has proven to be immensely...

Boffins discover tightest black hole binary system – and it's supermassive Sitting less than one light year apart in spiral galaxy NGC 7674 By Katyanna Quach 20 Sep 2017 at 05:02 23 SHARE ▼ Scientists have discovered the closest-ever supermassive black hole binary system. It's in the spiral galaxy NGC 7674, and the pair of voids are separated by a distance of less than one light year.Supermassive black hole binaries are rare. Until now, astronomers have only spotted one so far, about 24 light years apart. Finding two systems is important, as it provides more evidence that supermassive black holes collide in galaxies, and are the...

Cosmic rays fired at Earth - now we know where from The violent region at the centre of our galaxy is the prime candidate, after gamma ray analysis, Bill Condie reports. Photo montage of gamma-rays as measured by the HESS array on the night sky over Namibia, with one of the small HESS telescopes in the foreground. Credit: H.E.S.S. Collaboration, Fabio Acero and Henning Gast Astronomers believe they may have identified the source of the stream of cosmic rays that rain down on Earth from outer space. Cosmic rays are extremely high-energy particles such as protons and atomic nuclei....

A new photograph of galaxy NGC 4889 may look peaceful from such a great distance, but it’s actually home to one of the biggest black holes that astronomers have ever identified. The Hubble Space Telescope allowed scientists to capture photos of the galaxy, located in the Coma Cluster about 300 million light-years away. The supermassive black hole hidden away in NGC 4889 breaks all kinds of records, even though it is currently classified as dormant. So how big is it, exactly? Well, according to our best estimates, the supermassive black hole is roughly 21 billion times the size of the...

The apocalypse is still on, apparently — at least in a galaxy about 3.5 billion light-years from here. Last winter, a team of Caltech astronomers reported that two supermassive black holes appeared to be spiraling together toward a cataclysmic collision that could bring down the curtains in that galaxy. The evidence was a rhythmic flickering from the galaxy’s nucleus, a quasar known as PG 1302-102, which Matthew Graham and his colleagues interpreted as the fatal mating dance of a pair of black holes with a total mass of more than a billion suns. Their merger, the astronomers calculated, could release...

In the center of most galaxies (ours included) there is a supermassive black hole that holds everything together. However, one galaxy 10.5 billion light years away looks like it might have two black holes, and just like in Highlander, there can be only one. Scientists believe the pair are going to crash into each other in just 21 years. This could provide an unprecedented opportunity to observe the mind-boggling physics of such an event. The galaxy in question doesn’t have a snazzy name — it’s known only as PSO J334.2028+01.4075. It’s what is known as a quasar, or an “active...

Scientists name new ‘object’ SDSS J0100+2802 and say it is 12.8bn light years from Earth and was formed just 900m years after the Big Bang *************************************************************A monster black hole powering “the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe” has been discovered that is 12bn times more massive than the sun, scientists have revealed.The extraordinary object is at the centre of a quasar - an intensely powerful galactic radiation source - with a million billion times the sun’s energy output.For years the nature of quasars, discovered in 1963, remained a mystery. Today scientists believe they are generated by matter heating up as...

Mg20727753.800-1_300 NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory located a cosmic "ghost" that scientists think is evidence of a huge eruption produced by a supermassive black hole equal in power to a billion supernovas. The source, HDF 130, is over 10 billion light years away and existed at a time 3 billion years after the Big Bang, when galaxies and black holes were forming at a high rate. The X-ray ghost, so-called because a diffuse X-ray source has remained after other radiation from the outburst has died away, is in the Chandra Deep Field-North, one of the deepest X-ray images ever taken. "We'd...

Black holes are weird. Well, duh, right? But they do something that surprises most people: besides hoovering down almost everything nearby, they can also eject material as well. And by eject, I mean send it out screaming at nearly the speed of light and heated to a bazillion degrees. Picture from Chandra of the active galaxy pair 3C321 The image above is from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and it’s all about this scary scenario. Let’s take a walk down the gravity well, shall we? Basically, as matter swirls down into the maw of the hole, it forms a flattened disk...

Seven stars orbiting the region identify the invisible object. A second black hole lurks at the centre of our Galaxy, according to astronomers who have watched a cluster of stars spinning around it. Just three years ago, astronomers confirmed that the Milky Way revolves around a supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, which is about 2.6 million times more massive than the Sun. But now a much smaller black hole, just 1,300 times our Sun's mass, has been found orbiting about three light years away from its supermassive cousin. Jean-Pierre Maillard, an astronomer from the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris,...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 October 18 At the Center of the Milky Way Credit: Rainer Schödel (MPE) et al., NACO, ESO Explanation: At the center of our Milky Way Galaxy lies a black hole with over 2 million times the mass of the Sun. Once a controversial claim, this astounding conclusion is now virtually inescapable and based on observations of stars orbiting very near the galactic center. Using one of the...