#active galactic nuclei

[netmassimo]

An image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope depicts Arp-Madore 2339-661, an object that until not many years ago was considered a pair of interacting galaxies, cataloged as NGC 7733 (bottom right) and NGC 7734 (top left). However, observing the upper arm of NGC 7733, it's possible to see a sort of large knot of a color different from the predominant blue which is actually a dwarf galaxy, now cataloged as NGC 7733N. The consequence is that the interaction taking place is what some call a merging group. Mergers between two galaxies are normal but sometimes there are more galaxies and in this case, there are three of them that show signs of having active galactic nuclei.

[spacenutspod]

The Space, Astronomy & Science Podcast. SpaceTime Series 27 Episode 26 *The Brightest and Fastest Growing Black Hole Quasar Ever Seen Astronomers have uncovered a cosmic colossus: the most luminous quasar known, powered by a black hole 17 billion times the mass of the Sun and growing at a staggering rate. The quasar J0529-4351, situated over 12 billion light-years away, is a beacon from the early universe, challenging our understanding of black hole formation and growth. *Supernova 1987A's Hidden Heart: The Neutron Star Within NASA's Webb Space Telescope has pierced through the dusty veil of Supernova 1987A, revealing emissions indicative of a neutron star's presence. This discovery resolves a long-standing debate and provides a glimpse into the violent stellar processes that forge these dense remnants. *Surviving the Cosmic Rays: Earth's First Life and the Shield of Manganese How did life's early building blocks endure Earth's intense radiation? New research suggests that cell-like structures with manganese-based antioxidants could have been life's ancient protectors, enabling the survival and evolution of the first organisms in a gamma-ray-blasted world. *Leap Year Explained: Why February Gains an Extra Day As February 29 approaches, we demystify the leap year phenomenon. Learn how this calendrical correction ensures our timekeeping stays in harmony with Earth's orbit, and discover the historical and astronomical significance behind the extra day in February. Join us on SpaceTime as we delve into the depths of black holes, witness the aftermath of stellar explosions, and explore the primordial resilience of life on our planet. Tune in for a journey through the cosmos and the intricacies of our celestial calendar. Listen to SpaceTime on your favorite podcast app with our universal listen link: https://spacetimewithstuartgary.com/listen and access show links via https://linktr.ee/biteszHQ For more SpaceTime and show links: https://linktr.ee/biteszHQ For more space and astronomy podcasts visit our HQ at https://bitesz.com Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/spacetime-with-stuart-gary--2458531/support.

[bsuobservatory]

The Seyfert galaxy NGC 5985 (on the left) contains an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN).

AGN are so. Amazing.

In the dead center of the galaxy lies a supermassive black hole—and a large amount of other matter spiraling into it, caught in the gravitational well. As matter falls in, it accelerates to relativistic speeds, ripping apart until even atoms are split into plasma, and because plasma is not electrically neutral the metaphorical whirlwind of it generates an extremely strong electromagnetic field.

That field blasts matter away from the black hole in jets. These can be truly enormous. A single jet emanating from the black hole in the monstrous elliptical galaxy M87 is roughly ten times the length of our entire Milky Way Galaxy.

Seyfert galaxies are calmer than that, but the mechanism is the same. Bright, powerful AGN tend to be found in galaxies further from our own, while Seyferts dominate the AGN population in our local universe.

At BSU, we've imaged Markarian 421, a type of AGN called a blazar, so-named because the jet is aimed almost directly toward Earth.: "blazing" bright. We're in the process of studying our data, but the eventual goal is to determine limits for the mass of the black hole powering it. The student who spearheaded that research is now pursuing a Ph.D. at Purdue University!

2023 July 1

Three Galaxies in Draco Image Credit & Copyright: David Vernet , Jean-François Bax , Serge Brunier, OCA/C2PU

Explanation: This tantalizing trio of galaxies sometimes called the Draco Group, is located in the northern constellation of (you guessed it) Draco, the Dragon. From left to right are face-on spiral NGC 5985, elliptical galaxy NGC 5982, and edge-on spiral NGC 5981, all found within this single telescopic field of view that spans a little more than the width of the full moon. While the group is far too small to be a galaxy cluster, and has not been catalogued as a compact galaxy group, the three galaxies all do lie roughly 100 million light-years from planet Earth. Not as well known as other tight groupings of galaxies, the contrast in visual appearance still makes this triplet an attractive subject for astroimagers. On close examination with spectrographs, the bright core of striking spiral NGC 5985 shows prominent emission in specific wavelengths of light, prompting astronomers to classify it as a Seyfert, a type of active galaxy. This impressively deep exposure hints at a faint dim halo along with sharp-edged shells surrounding elliptical NGC 5982, evidence of past galactic mergers. It also reveals many even more distant background galaxies.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230701.html

[requiem-on-water]

(1) NGC 6956 barred spiral galaxy exists 214 million light-years away in the constellation Delphinus. (2) Interacting galaxies known as AM 1214-255 containing active galactic nuclei, or Agnes aka an extraordinarily luminous central region of a galaxy where its extreme brightness is caused by matter whirling into a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s heart.

{image credit: NASA}

[mysticstronomy]

WHAT IS MORE POWERFUL THAN A QUASAR??

Blog#409

Wednesday, June 12th, 2024.

Welcome back,

On July 12th, 2018, researchers announced that they’d caught a single, tiny, high-energy particle called a neutrino that had rained down on Earth from a supermassive black hole some 4 billion light-years away.

Astrophysicists are excited because this is only the third identified cosmic object they’ve managed to collect the elusive particles from — first the Sun, then a supernova that went off in a neighboring galaxy in 1987, and now a blazar.

So, what is a blazar, anyway?

At the center of most galaxies — including our own Milky Way — there’s a gargantuan black hole that can have the mass of millions or even billions of Suns. In some galaxies, this supermassive black hole may collect a swirling disk of gas, dust and stellar debris around it to eat from.

As material in the disk falls toward the black hole, its gravitational energy can be converted to light, making the centers of these galaxies very bright and giving them the name active galactic nuclei (AGN).

Some of these active galactic nuclei also shoot out colossal jets of material that travel close to the speed of light. Scientists call this a quasar.

But when a galaxy happens to be oriented so the jets point toward Earth — and we’re staring right down the barrel of the gun, as it were — it’s called a blazar. It’s the same thing as a quasar, just pointed at a different angle.

Those jets shoot matter at close to the speed of light in our direction and, we now know, produce high-energy neutrinos like the one detected by the IceCube instrument in September 2017.

The first blazar found was originally misidentified as an oddball of a star. In 1929, the German astronomer Cuno Hoffmeister published a catalog of 354 objects he thought were variable stars, or stars that get brighter and fainter over fairly short periods of time. This catalog included an object that was called BL Lacertae, or BL Lac for short, after the constellation it was in — Lacerta, the lizard.

By the late 1960s and 1970s, astronomers began to notice something funny about BL Lac. It did get brighter and fainter, but not in a regular, predictable way, and it seemed to emit a lot of light in the radio wave regime, which was unusual for stars.

Further studies showed that BL Lac was too far away to be a star in the Milky Way galaxy. And in some ways, its behavior looked more like another mysterious object astronomers were finding — called quasars — than it did variable stars.

Eventually, astronomers found that BL Lac was in fact a bright object in the center of a distant galaxy. And they began to find other objects that shared BL Lac’s strange properties, calling them “BL Lac objects.” By 1980, they coined the name blazars, combining “BL Lac objects” with the somewhat similar “quasars.”

Studies in the 1980s and 1990s gave evidence that the bright radio light from blazars came from jets of material moving at relativistic speeds. By the mid-1990s, astronomers determined that blazars, quasars, and some other bright galaxy phenomena they observed were all in the same family of objects: active galactic nuclei.

Originally published on www.astronomy.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, June 15th, 2024)

"WHY DO PLANETS ROTATE??"

[mindblowingscience]

These gas emissions are believed to fuel the process of star formation in galaxies but are not yet well understood. Astronomers are interested in learning more about them to improve our understanding of what governs galactic evolution.

This is the purpose of the SUper massive Black hole Winds in the x-rAYS (SUBWAYS) project, an international research effort dedicated to studying quasars using the ESA's XMM-Newton space telescope.

The first results of this project were shared by a group of scholars led by the University of Bologna and the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Italy. In the paper that describes their findings, the team presented X-ray spectroscopic data to characterize the properties of UFOs in 22 luminous galaxies.

Continue Reading

[importantwomensbirthdays]

Charlene Heisler

Charlene Heisler was born in 1961 in Calgary, Alberta. When Heisler was about to begin her PhD in astronomy, her doctors advised against it. They said that she would only survive a couple of years due to her cystic fibrosis. Yet she not only complete dher PhD at Yale, but also became a world-renowned astronomer. Heisler made significant contributions to the understanding of active galaxies, and to why some galaxies, but not others, have broad-line regions. Her final major project was the COLA project, which sought to determine whether there was a link between active galactic nuclei and starburst activity.

Charlene Heisler died in 1999 at the age of 37. The Astronomical Society of Australia gives the Charlene Heisler Prize each year in her honor.

[blasteffect]

The universe as seen with the eROSITA X-ray telescope

As eROSITA scans the sky, the energy of the collected photons is measured with an accuracy ranging from 2% – 6%.

To generate this image, in which the whole sky is projected onto an ellipse (so-called Aitoff projection) with the center of the Milky Way in the middle and the body of our Galaxy running horizontally, photons have been color-coded according to their energy (red for energies 0.3-0.6 keV, green for 0.6-1 keV, blue for 1-2.3 keV).

The red diffuse glow away from the galactic plane is the emission of the hot gas in the vicinity of the Solar System (the Local Bubble). Along the plane itself, dust and gas absorb the lowest energy X-ray photons, so that only high-energy emitting sources can be seen, and their color appears blue in the image.

The hotter gas close to the Galactic center, shown in green and yellow, carries imprinted the history of the most energetic processes in the life of the Milky Way, such as supernova explosions, driving fountains of gas out of the plane, and, possibly, past outburst from the now dormant supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way.

Piercing through this turbulent, hot diffuse medium, are hundreds of thousands of X-ray sources, which appear mostly white in the image, and uniformly distributed over the sky. Among them, distant active galactic nuclei are visible as point sources, while clusters of galaxies reveal themselves as extended X-ray nebulosities.

In total, about one million X-ray sources have been detected in this image.

Image credit: Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner & the eSASS team / Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics / Eugene Churazov & Marat Gilfanov, IKI.

[netmassimo]

An article being published in "The Astrophysical Journal" reports the results of the study of two galaxy mergers between dwarf galaxies with active galactic nuclei. A team of researchers used data collected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover candidates and then compared them with infrared observations conducted with NASA's WISE Space Telescope and optical frequency observations conducted with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT).

[livingforstars]

The Swirling Center of NGC 4261 - December 5th, 1995.

"What evil lurks in the hearts of galaxies? The above picture by the Hubble Space Telescope of the center of the nearby galaxy NGC 4261 tells us one dramatic tale. Here gas and dust are seen swirling near this elliptical galaxy's center into what is almost certainly a massive black hole. The disk is probably what remains of a smaller galaxy that fell in hundreds of millions of years ago. Collisions like this may be a common way of creating such active galactic nuclei as quasars. Strangely, the center of this fiery whirlpool is offset from the exact center of the galaxy - for a reason that remains an astronomical mystery."

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

New perspective on supermassive black holes

Some of the first data from an international space mission is confirming decades worth of speculation about the galactic neighborhoods of supermassive black holes.

More exciting than the data, though, is the fact that the long-awaited satellite behind it—the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission or XRISM—is just getting started providing such unparalleled insights.

"We have found the right tool for developing an accurate picture of the unexplored orders of magnitude around supermassive black holes," Jon Miller, professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan, said of XRISM.

"We're beginning to see clues of what that environment really looks like."

The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or JAXA, which teamed up with NASA and the European Space Agency to create and launch XRISM, announced the new results, which were also published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Miller was the lead author of that study. He and more than 100 co-authors from around the world investigated what's called an active galactic nucleus, which includes a supermassive black hole and its extreme surroundings.

To do this, they relied on XRISM's unparalleled ability to gather and measure spectra of X-rays emitted by cosmic phenomena.

"It is truly exciting that we are able to gather X-ray spectra with such unprecedented high resolution, particularly for the hottest plasmas in the universe," said Lia Corrales, U-M assistant professor of astronomy and a co-author of both XRISM publications.

"Spectra are so rich with information, we will surely be working to fully interpret the first datasets for many years to come."

Accretion disks with a twist

Space exploration enthusiasts may know that the Chandra X-ray Observatory—what NASA calls its flagship X-ray telescope—recently celebrated its 25th anniversary of operating in space.

What's less well known is that, over the past 25 years, an international cohort of scientists, engineers and space agency officials have been attempting to launch similarly sophisticated, but different X-ray missions. 

The goal of these attempts was to provide high-quality, complementary data to better understand what Chandra and other telescopes were seeing. XRISM is now delivering that data.

With their data set, Miller, Corrales and their colleagues have solidified a hypothesis about structures called accretion disks near supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei.

These disks can be thought of like vinyl records made of gas and other loose particles from a galaxy being spun by the spectacular gravity of the black holes at their centers. By studying accretion disks, researchers can better understand what's happening around the black hole and how it impacts the lifecycle of its host galaxy.

By probing the center of a galaxy called NGC 4151, more than 50 million light years away, the XRISM collaboration confirmed that the disk's shape isn't as simple as once thought.

"What we're seeing is that the record isn't flat. It has a twist or a warp," Miller said. "It also appears to get thicker toward the outside."

Although suggestions of this more complex geometry have emerged in other data over the past two and a half decades, the XRISM results are the strongest direct evidence for it.

"We had hints," Miller said. "But somebody in forensics would say that we couldn't have convicted anyone with what we had."

The team also found that the accretion disk appears to be losing a lot of its gas. Again, scientists have theories about what happens to this material, but Miller said XRISM will enable researchers to find more definitive answers.

"It has been very hard to say what the fate of that gas is," he said. "Actually finding the direct evidence is the hard work that XRISM can do."

And XRISM isn't just allowing researchers to think about existing theories in new ways. It's enabling them to investigate parts of space that were invisible to them before.

The missing link

For all the talk of their gravitational pull being so strong that not even light can escape it, black holes are still responsible for creating a whole lot of electromagnetic radiation that we can detect.

For instance, the Event Horizon Telescope—a network of instruments on Earth sensitive to radiation emitted as radio waves—has enabled astronomers to zoom in and see the very edge of two different black holes.

There are other instruments on Earth and in space that detect different bands of radiation, including X-rays and infrared light, to provide larger, galaxy-scale views of the environs of black holes.

But scientists have lacked high-resolution tools to determine what was going on between those two scales, from right next to the black hole up to the size of its host galaxy. And that space between is where accretion disks and other interesting celestial structures exist.

If you were to divide the scale of the zoomed-out view of a black hole by that of its close-up, you'd get a number close to 100,000. To a physicist, each zero is an order of magnitude, meaning the gap in coverage spanned five orders of magnitude.

"When it comes to understanding how gas gets into a black hole, how some of that gas is lost and how the black hole impacts its host galaxy, it's those orders of magnitude that really matter," Miller said.

XRISM now gives researchers access to those scales by looking for X-rays emitted by iron around black hols and relying on the "S" in its acronym: spectroscopy. 

Rather than using X-ray light to construct an image, XRISM's spectroscopy instrument detects the energy of individual X-rays, or photons. Researchers can then see how many photons were detected with a particular energy across a range, or spectrum, of energies.

By collecting, studying and comparing spectra from different parts of the regions near a black hole, researchers are able to learn more about the processes afoot.

"We joke that spectra put the 'physics' in 'astrophysics,'" Miller said.

Although there are other operational X-ray spectroscopy tools, XRISM's is the most advanced and relies on a microcalorimeter, dubbed "Resolve." This turns the incident X-ray energy into heat rather than, say, a more conventional electrical signal.

"Resolve is allowing us to characterize the multi-structured and multi-temperature environment of supermassive black holes in a way that was not possible before," Corrales said.

XRISM provides researchers with 10 times better energy resolution compared with what they've had before, Miller said. Scientists have been waiting for an instrument like this for 25 years, but it hasn't been for a lack of trying.

If at first you don't succeed

Years before its 1999 launch, Chandra was initially conceived of as the Advanced X-Ray Astrophysics Facility, a single mission that would fly with state-of-the-art technology for both X-ray imaging and spectroscopy.

That, however, proved to be too expensive, so it was divided into the Chandra telescope and a spectroscopy mission called Astro-E, whose development was led by JAXA. Unfortunately, Astro-E was lost during its launch in February 2000.

JAXA, NASA and the European Space Agency all realized how important the tool was, Miller said, and worked together to essentially refly the Astro-E mission roughly five years later. This time, however, the mission was called Suzaku, named after a phoenix-like mythical bird.

"Suzaku made it into orbit, but its cryogenic system had a leak, so all its coolant leaked into space. Its prime scientific instrument never took actual data," Miller said. "There was a different camera on board for X-rays, though, and it did really nice work for about 10 years."

Within months of sunsetting Suzaku, the space agencies launched a third mission to provide the X-ray spectroscopy that the community was seeking. The mission took off as Astro-H in February 2016 and was renamed Hitomi after it entered orbit and deployed its solar panels.

Miller had traveled to Florida for a meeting about Hitomi right around the time disaster struck the mission. A maneuvering error sent Hitomi into an uncontrollable spin.

"It spun so fast that the solar panels flew off," Miller said. 

Less than 40 days after the launch, the space agencies lost contact with Hitomi.

"You could actually go out on the beach in Florida at night and watch it tumble across the sky," Miller said. "It flickered in a very unique way."

Before it ended, the Hitomi mission did manage to take what Miller quantified as one and a half scientific observations. That was enough to transform how researchers thought about galaxy clusters, which contain hundreds or thousands of galaxies, he said.

So it's fair to say that a lot was riding on XRISM when it launched in September 2023. Based on early returns, it sounds like XRISM is equipped to deliver. Miller and a handful of his global colleagues were among the first to see the data that would lead to their new report.

"It was very late in Japan, an odd time in Europe and we were all on Zoom. All of us had trouble finding the words," Miller said. "It was breathtaking."

Miller's original doctoral thesis project was meant to study data from the Astro-E mission, so he's been invested in this work for more than half his life and virtually his entire science career.

During that time, Hitomi and more successful missions like Chandra have been providing data that have enabled him and others in the field to further our understanding of the cosmos. But the researchers also knew they'd need something like the X-ray calorimeter on board XRISM to make the leaps they've been hungry for.

"It's been difficult at many points, but we kept getting hints about what might be possible," Miller said. "It's almost impossible to replicate these environments in earthbound experiments and we've been wanting to know a lot of the details of how they really work. I think we're finally going to make some progress on that."

TOP IMAGE: An artist's rendering of what's called an active galactic nucleus at the center of NGC 4151. The galaxy's black hole sits at the center, immediately surrounded by an accretion disk shown in blue.  Credit JAXA

CENTRE IMAGE: A schematic shows how the XRISM mission can take spectra from different parts of an active galactic nucleus: the thin, hot accretion disk; an intermediate zone called the broad-line region; and a cooler, more diffuse torus. Credit JAXA

LOWER IMAGE: XRISM has shown that the accretion disk surrounding a black hole in an active galactic nucleus is warped, confirming earlier hypotheses reflected in this artist’s conception from 2015. Image credit: International Center for Radio Astronomy Research

[spacenutspod]

2 min read Hubble Glimpses a Bright Galaxy Group This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a tangled group of interacting galaxies called LEDA 60847. NASA/ESA/A. Barth (University of California – Irvine)/M. Koss (Eureka Scientific Inc.)/A. Robinson (Rochester Institute of Technology)/Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) This new NASA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a group of interacting galaxies known as LEDA 60847. LEDA 60847 is classified as an active galactic nuclei, or AGN. An AGN has a supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s central region that is accreting material. The AGN emits radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and shines extremely brightly. By studying powerful AGNs that are relatively nearby, astronomers can better understand how supermassive black holes grow and affect galaxies. Galaxy mergers are relatively common occurrences. Most larger galaxies are the result of smaller galaxies merging. The Milky Way itself contains traces of other galaxies, indicating it is the product of past mergers. Astronomers believe somewhere between 5% and 25% of all galaxies are currently merging.  This image of LEDA 60847 combines ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared data from Hubble. The ability to see across all those wavelengths is one of the things that makes Hubble unique. Different types of light across the electromagnetic spectrum tell astronomers different things about our universe. Ultraviolet light traces the glow of stellar nurseries and is used to identify the hottest stars. Visible light shows us moderate-temperature stars and material, and also how the view would appear to our own eyes. Last but not least, near-infrared light can penetrate cold dust, allowing us to study warm gas and dust, and relatively cool stars. LEARN MORE: Hubble’s Cosmic Collisions Hubble Science: Galaxy Details and Mergers Hubble Science: Tracing the Growth of Galaxies Download this image Media Contact: Claire AndreoliNASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MDclaire.andreoli@nasa.gov Share Details Last Updated Jan 23, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms Active Galaxies Astrophysics Division Galaxies Goddard Space Flight Center Hubble Space Telescope Missions The Universe Keep Exploring Discover More Topics From NASA Hubble Space Telescope Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has changed our fundamental understanding of the universe. Galaxies Stories Stars Stories James Webb Space Telescope Webb is the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It studies every phase in the…

[kny111]

Are Some Black Holes Wormholes In Disguise? Gamma-Ray Blasts May Shed Clues

I’ve recently in my spare time been doing some reading and reviewing on supermassive black holes, relativistic jets and wormholes especially after noticing that the supermassive black hole in the movie ‘Interstellar’ didn’t have an astrophysical jet which is required for a black hole to be supermassive. This had me thinking, where else were there any inconsistencies with our main views of black holes and quasars? What are the differences between them and what makes them a quasar?

Are there some that connect with each other at different dimensionalities beyond that of our own cosmos like what occurs with hyper-black holes or are their physics perfectly accountable for within current cosmology’s explanations without hyperdimensionality explanations?

The difficulty in even figuring this out in acquiring any data and what that data looks like is it’s so difficult to spot a black hole let a alone a wormhole. In this article from Space, writers try to figure out if any such connection occurs by observing the outbursts from Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) which are a type of supermassive black hole heavier than those at our own galactic center. These are helpful for this type of study because the temperatures the gamma ray bursts they release can be quantified and better understood. Here’s more from the article:

Unusual flashes of gamma rays could reveal that what appear to be giant black holes are actually huge wormholes, a new study finds.

Wormholes are tunnels in space-time that can theoretically allow travel anywhere in space and time, or even into another universe. Einstein's theory of general relativity suggests wormholes are possible, although whether they really exist is another matter.

In many ways, wormholes resemble black holes. Both kinds of objects are extremely dense and possess extraordinarily strong gravitational pulls for bodies their size. The main difference is that no object can theoretically come back out after crossing a black hole's event horizon — the threshold where the speed needed to escape the black hole's gravitational pull exceeds the speed of light — whereas any body entering a wormhole could theoretically reverse course.

Assuming wormholes might exist, researchers investigated ways that one might distinguish a wormhole from a black hole. They focused on supermassive black holes with masses millions to billions of times that of the sun, which are thought to dwell at the hearts of most, if not all, galaxies. For example, at the center of our Milky Way galaxy lies Sagittarius A*, a monster black hole that is about 4.5 million solar masses in size.

Anything entering one mouth of a wormhole would exit out its other mouth. The scientists reasoned that meant that matter entering one mouth of a wormhole could potentially slam into matter entering the other mouth of the wormhole at the same time, a kind of event that would never happen with a black hole.

Any matter falling into a mouth of a supermassive wormhole would likely travel at extraordinarily high speeds due to its powerful gravitational fields. The scientists modeled the consequences of matter flowing through both mouths of a wormhole to where these mouths meet, the wormhole's "throat." The result of such collisions are spheres of plasma expanding out both mouths of the wormhole at nearly the speed of light, the researchers said.

"What surprises me most of all is that no one has proposed this idea before, because it is rather simple," study lead author Mikhail Piotrovich, an astrophysicist at the Central Astronomical Observatory in Saint Petersburg, Russia, told Space.com.

The researchers compared the outbursts from such wormholes with those from a kind of supermassive black hole known as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), which can spew out more radiation than our entire galaxy does as they devour matter around them, and do so from a patch of space no larger than our solar system. AGNs are typically surrounded by rings of plasma known as accretion disks and can emit powerful jets of radiation from their poles.

Full Article: Are Some Black Holes Wormholes In Disguise? Gamma-Ray Blasts May Shed Clues

[brightestofcentaurus]

"Megamaser" Galaxy

"Feast your eyes on Hubble's Megamaser galaxy! Phenomena across the Universe emit radiation spanning the entire electromagnetic spectrum — from high-energy gamma rays, which stream out from the most energetic events in the cosmos, to lower-energy microwaves and radio waves. Microwaves, the very same radiation that can heat up your dinner, are produced by a multitude of astrophysical sources, including strong emitters known as masers (microwave lasers), even stronger emitters with the somewhat villainous name of megamasers and the centers of some galaxies. Especially intense and luminous galactic centers are known as active galactic nuclei. They are in turn thought to be driven by the presence of supermassive black holes, which drag surrounding material inwards and spit out bright jets and radiation as they do so. The two galaxies shown here, imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, are named MCG+01-38-004 (the upper, red-tinted one) and MCG+01-38-005 (the lower, blue-tinted one). MCG+01-38-005 (also known as NGC 5765B) is a special kind of megamaser; the galaxy’s active galactic nucleus pumps out huge amounts of energy, which stimulates clouds of surrounding water. Water’s constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen are able to absorb some of this energy and re-emit it at specific wavelengths, one of which falls within the microwave regime, invisible to Hubble but detectable by microwave telescopes. MCG+01-38-005 is thus known as a water megamaser! Astronomers can use such objects to probe the fundamental properties of the Universe. The microwave emissions from MCG+01-38-005 were used to calculate a refined value for the Hubble constant, a measure of how fast the Universe is expanding. This constant is named after the astronomer whose observations were responsible for the discovery of the expanding Universe and after whom the Hubble Space Telescope was named, Edwin Hubble."

Image and information from NASA

[mysticstronomy]

HOW OLD IS PHOENIX A* BLACK HOLE??

Blog#380

Saturday, March 2nd, 2024.

Welcome back,

Black holes are the most massive objects that we know of in the Universe. Not stellar mass black holes, not supermassive black holes (SMBHs,) but ultra-massive black holes (UMBHs.) UMBHs sit in the center of galaxies like SMBHs, but they have more than five billion solar masses, an astonishingly large amount of mass. The largest black hole we know of is Phoenix A, a UMBH with up to 100 billion solar masses.

How can something grow so massive?

UMBHs are rare and elusive, and their origins are unclear. A team of astrophysicists working on the question used a simulation to help uncover the formation of these massive objects. They traced UMBH’s origins back to the Universe’s ‘Cosmic Noon‘ around 10 to 11 billion years ago.

Their paper is “Ultramassive Black Holes Formed by Triple Quasar Mergers at z = 2,” and it’s published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The lead author is Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonian.

“We found that one possible formation channel for ultra-massive black holes is from the extreme merger of massive galaxies that are most likely to happen in the epoch of the ‘cosmic noon,'” said Ni.

UMBHs are extremely rare. Creating them in scientific simulations requires a massive, complex simulation. This is where Astrid comes in. It’s a large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulator that runs on the Frontera supercomputer at the University of Texas, Austin. Astrid’s large-scale simulations can track things like dark matter, temperature, metallicity, and neutral hydrogen.

Simulations like Astrid are ranked by the number of particles their simulations contain, and Astrid is at the top of that list.

“The science goal of Astrid is to study galaxy formation, the coalescence of supermassive black holes, and re-ionization over the cosmic history,” said lead author Ni in a press release. (Ni is a co-developer of Astrid.) A powerful tool like Astrid needs a powerful supercomputer. Luckily, UT Austin has the most powerful academic supercomputer in the USA.

“Frontera is the only system that we performed Astrid from day one. It’s a pure Frontera-based simulation,” she explained.

Astronomers know that galaxies grow large through mergers, and it’s likely that SMBHs grow more massive at the same time. But UMBHs are even more massive and much rarer. How do they form?

The team’s work with Astrid delivered an answer.

“What we found are three ultra-massive black holes that assembled their mass during the cosmic noon, the time 11 billion years ago when star formation, active galactic nuclei (AGN), and supermassive black holes, in general, reach their peak activity,” Ni said.

Originally published on www.universetoday.com

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, March 6th, 2024)

"A GALAXY THAT HAS NO STARS??"

[quasarlasar]

I finally have working digital art equipment/software so I'm testing it out by doing a quick doodle. I had a dream a couple of nights ago where Tartarus was eating stars like popcorn, so I drew this. I should note here that the stars are meant to be point sources in this drawing; Tartarus is larger than the solar system so he's much bigger than the stars. I did make them look a little pop-corn-y though.

In other news, I graduated with my PhD in astronomy and astrophysics, which I did studying active galactic nuclei, which is just the fancy term for supermassive black holes that are actively feeding. Generally on gas clouds though, not stars...and definitely not popcorn.

I have more updates coming in the next month, and hopefully I will be able to digitally ink and color some comics now.