Rare Star Explosion Reveals Hidden Black Hole in Our Galaxy
Astronomers have spotted a rare X-ray star explosion near the center of our Milky Way galaxy, revealing a previously unknown black hole munching on gas from a neighboring sun-like star.
Image: Gas builds up in a storage disk around a black hole, eventually leading to a bright X-ray nova. Credit:NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
NASA’s Swift satellite made the cosmic find last month when it detected a new and rapidly brightening X-ray source a few degrees from the galactic center of the Milky Way. Astronomers identified the outburst as a short-lived bright X-ray nova, which is produced when a stream of gas rushes toward either a neutron star or a black hole. Unlike a supernova, which is the explosive death of a star, novas are smaller explosions that do not completely destroy a star.
The black hole is thought to be 20,000 to 30,000 light-years away in the galaxy’s inner region. Astronomers, who named the bright X-ray nova Swift J1745-26 after its coordinates in space, said witnessing such an event is rare.
Anniversary of First Female ISS Commander Launches
Five years ago today, on Oct. 10, 2007, U.S. astronaut Peggy A. Whitson, the first woman to command the International Space Station, launched with Expedition 16 crewmates on the Soyuz TMA-11. Pictured here on Oct. 28, 2007, Whitson, takes a moment to pose for a photo with astronauts Scott Parazynski (left), STS-120 mission specialist, and Daniel Tani, Expedition 16 flight engineer, as they prepare for the mission’s second session of extravehicular activity (EVA) in the Quest Airlock of the ISS while space shuttle Discovery is docked with the station. Parazynski and Tani are attired in their Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits. Image Credit: NASA
How does the universe work? Understanding the Universe’s birth and its ultimate fate are essential first steps to unveil the mechanisms of how it works. This, in turn, requires knowledge of its history, which started with the Big Bang.
Previous NASA investigations with the Cosmic Microwave Background Explorer (COBE) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) have measured the radiation from the Universe when it was only 300,000 years old, confirming theoretical models of its early evolution. With its improved sensitivity and resolution, the Planck observatory is now probing the long wavelength sky to new depths in its 2-year sky survey, providing stringent new constraints on the physics of the first few moments of the Universe. Moreover, the possible detection and investigation of the so-called B-mode polarization pattern on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) impressed by gravitational waves during those initial instants will provide clues for how the large-scale structures we observe today came to be.
Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories showed that the Universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, implying that some day - in the very distant future - anyone looking at the night sky would see only our Galaxy and its stars. The billions of other galaxies will have receded beyond detection by these future observers. The origin of the force that is pushing the Universe apart is a mystery, and astronomers refer to it simply as “dark energy”. This new, unknown component, which comprises ~75% of the matter-energy content of the Universe, will determine the ultimate fate of all. Determining the nature of dark energy, its possible history over cosmic time, is perhaps the most important quest of astronomy for the next decade and lies at the intersection of cosmology, astrophysics, and fundamental physics.
Knowing how the laws of physics behave at the extremes of space and time, near a black hole or a neutron star, is also an important piece of the puzzle we must obtain if we are to understand how the universe works. Current observatories operating at X-ray and gamma-ray energies, such as the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, XMM-Newton, are producing a wealth of information on the conditions of matter near compact sources, in extreme gravity fields unattainable on Earth. Future missions such as LISA and the International X-ray Observatory, will push the frontier of knowledge of exotic astrophysical phenomena related to extreme regimes even further in space and time. For PCOS, the decade ahead holds the promise of exciting discoveries and new, bolder questions.
One of the four 8-meter VLT telescopes (Very Large Telescope) located in the European Southern Observatory (ESO) site on Cerro Paranal is photographed under starry sky of Atacama Desert in Chile. Strong laser of Adaptive Optics system is beamed to the sky from the telescope.
Giant eyes on the Cerro Paranal Observatory in the barren Atacama Desert explore the worlds beyond.
The bright central bulge of the Milky Way galaxy in the constellations Scorpius and Sagittarius approaches the western horizon in this single-exposure photograph.
This Is the Most Detailed Image of the Universe Ever Captured
NASA has just published the most detailed view of the Universe ever taken. It’s called the Extreme Deep Field—or XDF for short. It took ten years of Hubble Space Telescope photographs to make it and it shows some the oldest galaxies ever observed by humans, going 13.2 billion years back in time.
It’s a mindblowing, extremely humbling view. Not only for what it shows, but for what it doesn’t show. While this image contains about 5,500 galaxies, it only displays a tiny part of the sky, a ridiculously small slice of the Universe. As you can see in the image below (make sure to expand it to see it complete), the photo only focus on a small area of the constellation Fornax.
This illustration compares the angular size of the XDF field to the angular size of the full moon. A finger held at arm’s length would appear to be about twice the width of the moon in this image.
This graphic shows (click to expand) the foreground (galaxies less than 5 billion light years away from us), background (between 5 and 9 billion years ago) and very far background galaxies (more than 9 billion years), which are “one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see.
Click Here to download the full image (13mb TIFF image)
AJSKDHALKJSDHASLD WHY HAS NO ONE ON MY FEED MENTIONED THAT MOTHERFUCKING BRIAN COX WAS IN THIS EPISODE?!
A Tale of Two Hemispheres
Image Credit & Copyright: Tunç Tezel and Stéphane Guisard
