Invading black holes cause ‘cosmic flashes’

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.

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.

August 10th, 2009 LONDON - Computer simulations indicate that a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon, which would lead to the breakdown of the laws of physics. In 1969, physicist Roger Penrose postulated that every singularity, or black hole, must be shrouded by an event horizon from which nothing, including light, can escape.

July 15th, 2009 LONDON - New simulations have revealed that turbulence created by jets of material ejected from the disks of the Universe's largest black holes is responsible for halting star formation. The simulations have been made by Evan Scannapieco, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU) and Professor Marcus Brueggen of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany.

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 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 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 24th, 2009 Telescope finds space blobs are pubescent galaxiesWASHINGTON — Mysterious space blobs aren't infant galaxies as astronomers once thought. Scientists say they mostly consist of galaxies going through puberty, all hot and bothered.

May 29th, 2009 WASHINGTON - NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a cosmic "ghost" lurking around a distant supermassive black hole, which is the first detection of such a high-energy apparition, and may be evidence of a huge eruption produced by the black hole. The X-ray ghost, so-called because a diffuse X-ray source has remained after other radiation from the outburst has died away, is in the Chandra Deep Field-North, one of the deepest X-ray images ever taken.

May 17th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronauts John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel installed new equipment Saturday on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope to help scientists study the origins of the universe. US space agency NASA said that the third of the current shuttle mission's five scheduled spacewalks was completed in six and a half hours.

May 16th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A pill used to treat nerve pain has been found effective in treating hot flashes in women, claim Mayo Clinic researchers. They have found that pregabalin decreased hot flash severity and frequency about 20 percent more than did a placebo.

April 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - New calculations by scientists suggest that hundreds of massive rogue black holes, left over from the galaxy-building days of the early universe, may wander the Milky Way. The calculations have been made by Ryan O'Leary and Avi Loeb from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

April 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - Researchers at North Carolina (NC) State University have used a mathematical model that allows them to get a clearer picture of the galaxy's youngest supernova remnant by clearing away the distortions caused by "cosmic dust". Their new data provides evidence that this remnant is from a type Ia supernova - the explosion of a white dwarf star - and raises questions about the ways in which magnetic fields affect the generation of the remnant's cosmic ray particles.

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".