Cosmic “ghost” found lurking around supermassive black hole

September 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A dramatic new view of the center of the Milky Way galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has exposed new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center. The 88 Chandra pointings represents a freeze-frame of the spectacle of stellar evolution, from bright young stars to black holes, in a crowded, hostile environment dominated by a central, supermassive black hole.

September 19th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Mathematicians at the University of Leeds, UK, have determined that cosmic flashes, known as gamma ray bursts, are produced by jets of plasma that originate from invading black holes. Gamma ray bursts are beams of high-energy radiation that are similar to the radiation emitted by explosions of nuclear weapons.

September 3rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astronomers from the University of Hawaii has discovered a giant galaxy surrounding the most distant supermassive black hole ever found. The galaxy, which is 12.8 billion light-years from Earth, is as large as the Milky Way galaxy and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as does our Sun.

September 3rd, 2009 MUNICH - The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has released a striking new image of a nearby spiral galaxy that many astronomers think closely resembles our own Milky Way. Though the galaxy is seen edge-on, observations of NGC 4945 suggest that this hive of stars is a spiral galaxy much like our own, with swirling, luminous arms and a bar-shaped central region.

August 24th, 2009 LONDON - New estimates bys scientists suggest that the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy may be twice as big as originally thought, and possibly large enough to measure directly. M87 is 55 million light years away.

August 11th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new supercomputer simulation designed to track the fate of the universe's first black holes has found that the mysterious cosmic objects couldn't efficiently gorge themselves on nearby gas, and thus had to keep themselves on a strict diet, starving in the process. "The first stars were much more massive than most stars we see today, upwards of 100 times the mass of our sun," said John Wise, a post-doctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and one of the study's authors.

July 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new research has determined that the tight cluster of stars surrounding a supermassive black hole after it has been violently kicked out of a galaxy represents a new kind of astronomical object and a fossil record of the kick. The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal discusses the theoretical properties of "hypercompact stellar systems" and suggests that hundreds of these faint star clusters might be detected at optical wavelengths in our immediate cosmic environment.

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 BERLIN - Astronomers have unveiled the largest map of cold cosmic dust, which are peppered in the inner regions of the Milky Way galaxy, and are the potential birthplaces of new stars. Made using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this will prove an invaluable map for observations made with the forthcoming ALMA telescope, as well as the recently launched ESA Herschel space telescope.

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 25th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New data obtained from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other telescopes has pinpointed the source of "cosmic blobs" as growing supermassive black holes. This discovery helps resolve the true nature of gigantic blobs of gas observed around very young galaxies.

June 5th, 2009 MUNICH - Astronomers have found that a stellar family near a supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, is surprisingly normal. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have obtained one of the sharpest views ever of the Arches Cluster - an extraordinary dense cluster of young stars near the supermassive black hole.

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.

April 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have found the most distant signs of water in the Universe to date, in the form of water vapor contained in a jet ejected from a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. Dr. John McKean of the Netherlands Institute has made the discovery for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON).

March 26th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have suggested that a special class of black holes have a mechanism for regulating the rate at which they grow, and can shut off the high-speed jets they produce. Some stellar-mass black holes launch powerful jets of particles and radiation, like seen in quasars, and are called "micro-quasars".