Lurking in the depths of a galaxy, hidden from human eyes, lie millions of monsters. They could swallow you up in an instant, sealing you off from the outside world and devouring you atom by atom. This sounds like your typical Hollywood monster movie, but with millions of black holes hidden throughout the galaxy, its more real than you might think. Supermassive black holes, the largest ones that reside at the centers of galaxies, are much easier to see. They are devouring gas and dust rapidly, resulting in bright emission across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially in x-rays. For many galaxies,...
Today is a busy day in the world of astronomy and space news. The US Air Force has approved SpaceX for military launches, ending a ten year monopoly by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. A black hole jet moving at nearly the speed of light is having traffic issues, resulting in knots of jet material rear-ending each other. An experiment in Quantum Mechanics has shown that reality simply doesn’t exist until we measure it. Finally, the Gemini planet imager has found a bright, disk-shaped ring of dust around the star HD 115600, which is being likened to the Kuiper Belt in the...
One of the largest and brightest star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy is the Arches cluster, and its easy to see why. Lying only 100 light years away from the supermassive black hole that lies in the heart of our galaxy, it formed in an incredibly dense environment. It lies 25,000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius, and contains thousands of massive stars, including 160 that are hot, young, and exceptionally more massive than the Sun. Only 1 in 10 Million stars in the galaxy are as bright as these massive central 160 stars. Though it is...
Of the approximately 100 Million galaxies in the visible universe, we see incredible variation. We always try to classify them based on their shape, size, and peak radiation, but even then we still find others that stray from the usual patterns. In recent years, a new class of galaxies named Extremely Luminous Infrared Galaxies (ELIRGs) has been found with data from the Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE). Now the king of the ELIRGs has been found, the most luminous galaxy in the universe. The galaxy, designated WISE J224607.57-052635.0, has a luminosity equal to 300 Trillion suns, and may owe its brightness...
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. The incredible and rare dark star cluster, hiding the evil super villain’s headquarters. A dark star cluster is something I would imagine as a spooky, eerie type of place where everything you see changes when you enter its space. Science fiction aside, a dark star cluster is real, and it’s a new type of cluster that is similar to the mighty dense globular clusters that orbit most galaxies. Globular clusters orbit in a halo of space around the centres of galaxies, and though our Milky Way harbours 150 of them,...
Globular Clusters are tightly packed collections of hundreds of thousands of very old stars, spherically distributed around the Milky Way Galaxy. They undergo little change, have nearly no gas, and have a stellar density way higher than the rest of the Galaxy. The first one discovered, in 1665, is messier 22, one of the most well studied, easily visible, and interesting globular clusters. Based on observations, this globular cluster contains at least two black holes. It is also one of only three globular clusters ever found to host a planetary nebula, a gaseous shell emitted by a dying star with...
Have you ever heard of an object called ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp?’ It’s a thin wispy ghost-like blob at the edge of a Galaxy. It was discovered by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel in 2007 as she was classifying galaxies as part of the Galaxy Zoo project. Since then, astronomers have been studying its origin, as it was the first of a brand new phenomenon in astronomy. This past week, a new data set of wispy trails at the edge of Galaxies have been released as part of a Hubble study by Bill Keel of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. The new Hubble...
A few months ago I talked about Astronomers seeing the gas cloud known as G2 passing the central black hole of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A*, and how we had hoped to watch the black hole destroy it in order to learn about the behaviour of supermassive black holes. As we all sat and watched the passage of the cloud over the course of a few months, we were surprised to find that the cloud remained intact and passed straight by Sag A*. When we last checked in, the leading theory was that the ‘cloud’ actually was a dense...
The science of Astronomy goes far beyond what humans can see with our eyes. The visible part of the spectrum has taught us so much, but when we look at all photons across the spectrum of light, we find exponentially more powerful methods for discovering the mysteries of the universe. Radio waves, yes the same ones that bring you music in your car, are found throughout the universe in very interesting environments. Radio waves often trace the most powerful objects in the universe, such as super-massive black holes, quasars, and other types of active galactic nuclei. Humans see visible light...
1,200 Km / s. That’s fast. Fast enough to race around the entire Earth in 30 seconds. Except that it’s not a bullet, it’s a star, larger and more massive than the Earth. And a multinational team of astronomers has discovered it, and more importantly, where it came from and why it’s moving so fast. Hypervelocity stars (HVS’) are an uncommon phenomenon, since the conditions necessary to accelerate them to incredible speeds are rare. There are only about 20 HVS known, and the first was found only ten years ago. So where do they come from? There are only a...
