Astrophysicists detect gamma rays emitting from heart of distant galaxy

August 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way. The fast-moving stars shed new light on how these distant galaxies, which are a fraction the size of our Milky Way, may have evolved into the full-grown galaxies seen around us today.

July 15th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has found the core of an active galaxy, where a feeding supermassive black hole drives oppositely directed particle jets, as revealed by gamma rays. Gamma rays from the narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxy PMN J0948+0022 show that its central black hole drives a fast-moving particle beam.

July 14th, 2009 SYDNEY - A team of astronomers has made the most detailed map yet of a rare radio galaxy, which is like the 'blue whale' of space. According to a report by ABC News, the map of Centaurus A, a galaxy in the Centaurus constellation, covers a segment of sky 200 times the area of the full moon.

July 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable "dark matter" believed to make up much of the mass of the universe. In two separate scientific papers, the astrophysicists show that this distribution of gamma rays can be explained by the way "antimatter positrons" from the radioactive decay of elements, created by massive star explosions in the galaxy, propagate through the galaxy.

July 6th, 2009 LONDON - Astronomers have come by the first solid evidence of a new class of medium sized black holes, with more than 500 times the sun's mass, in a distant galaxy. This new source, identified as HLX-1 (Hyper-Luminous X-ray source 1), lies towards the edge of the galaxy ESO 243-49.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have used NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope to discover 16 pulsars. A pulsar is the rapidly spinning and highly magnetized core left behind when a massive star explodes.

July 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Using a worldwide combination of diverse telescopes, astronomers have discovered that a giant galaxy's bursts of very high energy gamma rays are coming from a region very close to the supermassive black hole at its core. The discovery provides important new information about the mysterious workings of the powerful "engines" in the centers of innumerable galaxies throughout the Universe.

July 2nd, 2009 LONDON - An international team of astronomers has discovered a new class of black hole, more than 500 times the mass of the Sun. Astronomers made the finding in a distant galaxy approximately 290 million light years from Earth.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has found most dark gamma-ray bursts occur in normal galaxies detectable by large, ground-based optical telescopes. Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's biggest explosions, capable of producing so much light that ground-based telescopes easily detect it billions of light-years away.

May 28th, 2009 PARIS - Astronomers have used new data from ESA's (European Space Agency's) XMM-Newton spaceborne observatory, to probe closer than ever to a supermassive black hole lying deep at the core of a distant active galaxy. The galaxy - known as 1H0707-495 - was observed during four 48-hr-long orbits of XMM-Newton around Earth, starting in January 2008.

May 5th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery. "Fermi's Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it's also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays," said Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings.

April 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astronomers has used the world's biggest radio telescope to look deep into the brightest galaxies that NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can see. The study solidifies the link between an active galaxy's gamma-ray emissions and its powerful radio-emitting jets.

April 4th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new study has suggested that a brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago, and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again in the future. Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses.

March 20th, 2009 WASHINGTON - An international team of astrophysicists, using telescopes on the ground and in space, has uncovered surprising changes in radiation emitted by an active galaxy classified as a Blazar. The picture that emerges from these first-ever simultaneous observations with optical, X-ray and new-generation gamma-ray telescopes is much more complex than scientists expected and challenges current theories of how the radiation is generated.

March 13th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have developed a new map combining nearly three months of data from NASA's Fermi Telescope to obtain the best-ever view of gamma rays in space. To Fermi's eyes, the universe is ablaze with gamma rays from sources ranging from within the solar system to galaxies billions of light-years away.