A research team, led by a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), discovered that the heaviest black holes tend to be located in galactic environments with higher density. This finding indicates that galaxies in a dense area often merge together, causing the growth of supermassive black holes. An artist’s illustration of galaxy distribution, [continue reading]
Quasars are among the brightest, oldest, most distant, and most powerful objects in the Universe. Powered by massive black holes at the center of most known galaxies, quasars can emit enormous amounts of energy, up to a thousand times the total output of the hundreds of billions of stars in our entire Milky Way. [continue reading]
July 23, 2013 NGC 3393, a spiral galaxy in Hydra Image Credit: NASA/STScI NGC 3393 is a barred spiral galaxy of some 9,800 light-years across, located about 160 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Hydra (Water snake). It is receding from us at approximately 3750 kilometers per second. Remarkable is that the [continue reading]
Staring at a small patch of sky for more than 50 hours with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have for the first time identified discrete sources that account for nearly all the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. They found that about 63 percent of the background radio emission [continue reading]
Lurking at the centers of most galaxies are supermassive black holes that can weigh anywhere from one million to one billion times as much as the Sun. New research, published today in the Astrophysical Journal, shows that these black holes are growing at much larger rates than had previously been thought possible. Even the black hole [continue reading]
In a letter to Nature, an international team of astronomers, including Marc Sarzi from the University of Hertfordshire, report the exciting discovery of a new way to measure the mass of supermassive black holes in galaxies. By measuring the speed with which carbon monoxide molecules orbit around such black holes, this new research opens [continue reading]