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...
The thing about black holes is that they are very dense. If we took the entire 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kg of the Sun (This is the real mass of the Sun) and turned it into a black hole, it would be about 6 Km in diameter. It is theorized that there are around 100 Million Black holes in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. But if they aren’t near a large reservoir of gas and dust, with their small size they are pretty harmless and invisible. The only way we could find them would be through their gravitational influence, which is hard to...
A vast number of Galaxies in the Universe have a central black hole that is incredibly massive. The Black Hole at the centre of the Milky Way, dubbed Sag A*, is estimated to have a mass as high as three Million Suns. We generally can’t see black holes, but when they start to pull in matter from surrounding gas and dust clouds, the material forms a disk around the star. This accretion disk can heat up to incredible temperatures and emit X-rays and other high energy light, allowing us to see where the black holes are. Sometimes the light from...
I thought Hurricanes had powerful winds. The strongest wind ever recorded was a gust up to 400 Kph near a tropical cyclone in Australia. But Earthbound wind has nothing on Galactic wind. Around the time when our ancestors were just learning to walk upright, the core of the Milky Way Galaxy unleashed a blast of gasses and material at 2 Million Kph. Millions of years later, we see the aftermath of this eruption as two massive bubbles of material blown out above and below the galactic centre, at least 30,000 Light Years tall! The lobes were discovered by the...
Quasars are Galaxies with incredibly massive Black Holes at their centre. These Black Holes are fuelled by a swirling disc of material that can be ejected in a long jet along their axis of rotation, all due to the conservation of angular momentum. This accretion disc can be so hot that it causes the central region of the Galaxy to shine more brightly than the entire Galaxy of stars surrounding it. A Belgian team using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) studied a population of 93 Quasars spread over Billions of Light-Years, and noticed that the rotation axes of the Quasars...
