In The News: Department of Physics and Astronomy
Milky Way’s supermassive black hole has a mysterious past, and scientists have found some evidence to explain its behaviour. The supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*, is located 26,000 light-years away from Earth in the center of our galaxy.
Large galaxies like ours are hosts to Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs.) They can be so massive that they resist comprehension, with some of them having billions of times more mass than the Sun. Ours, named Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is a little more modest at about four million solar masses.
Astronomers studying the Milky Way's supermassive black hole have found "compelling evidence" that could finally help explain its mysterious past. Located 26,000 light-years away in the center of our galaxy, Sagittarius A* is a gargantuan tear in space-time that is 4 million times the mass of our sun and 14.6 million miles (23.5 million kilometers) wide.
The mystery of how supermassive black holes, which can be millions of times more massive than the sun and sit at the heart of most galaxies, came to exist is one of the great questions in astrophysics.
One of the greatest mysteries of the universe is the formation of the appropriately termed supermassive black holes, which can weigh up to a million times the mass of the sun and are found in the center of most galaxies.
The giant black hole at the center of our galaxy has an unexpected spin, which is likely to be the result of a merger with another large black hole. The merger almost certainly occurred with the smaller, but still technically supermassive, black hole at the heart of a galaxy that was swallowed by the Milky Way.
The universe is an infinite abyss filled with curiosities that have been puzzling humankind since we first craned our necks to the moonlit sky. Among these mysteries, the origins and mergers of supermassive black holes hold a special place. Imagine a celestial entity with mass a million times that of the sun, tucked away in the center of a galaxy. That’s not just any old space mystery – it’s one of the grandest enigmas of the cosmos.
Earth has one of the most interesting weather systems. Its atmosphere is ideal for moving hot and cold air around, and a hydrological cycle allows for precipitation. But throughout our solar system, there are other planets that have more extreme and also fascinating weather patterns worth exploring.
We’re interested in the moon because it’s close enough to Earth to allow us to practice setting up a base camp in preparation for Mars. In fact, Artemis III will send the first crewed spacecraft to the moon’s South Pole to set up camp by 2034.
When Earth and our moon were much closer together than they are now, the duo could have had tiny companions, or a disk revolving around them in orbits around the pair's poles, a new study finds. These findings suggest that similar moonlets could orbit distant exoplanets and their moons, researchers said.
Researchers in China claimed to have captured a ray from the biggest explosion since the Big Bang. A new study done by a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggests that a massive cosmic explosion, possibly the largest since the Big Bang, occurred when matter and antimatter collided at nearly the speed of light.
Researchers in China claimed to have captured a ray from the biggest explosion since the Big Bang. A new study done by a team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences suggests that a massive cosmic explosion, possibly the largest since the Big Bang, occurred when matter and antimatter collided at nearly the speed of light.