Anne’s Picture of the Day: The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy

 Anne's Image of the Day
mrt 112013
 
Anne's Picture of the Day: The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy

March 11, 2013 The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy in Fornax Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh Astrophotography (http://www.martinpughastrophotography.id.au/) NGC 1365, also known as the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, is, as you would have guessed by its nickname, a huge barred spiral galaxy. It is over 200,000 light-years across, what makes it one of the largest [continue reading]

The Mystery of a Super-Fast Spinning Supermassive Black Hole

 Astrophysics, Cosmology
feb 282013
 
The Mystery of a Super-Fast Spinning Supermassive Black Hole

  Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, have teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our Sun.  This artist’s concept illustrates a supermassive black hole with millions to [continue reading]