quasar – Page 2 – Astronomy Now

Hundreds of galaxies hidden in quasar’s 46-billion-sun glare

17 August 2018 Astronomy Now

Astronomers discover a huge cluster of galaxies ‘hidden in plain sight’ in the glare of a quasar and its voracious central black hole, raising the possibility the universe contains more mass than previously suspected

Quasar provides clues about conditions in the early Universe

10 July 2018 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have found a brilliant quasar harbouring a super-massive black hole some 13 billion light years away, one of the most distant ever discovered, providing a tool of sorts to study conditions in the very early Universe.

‘Monster’ black hole consuming the Sun’s mass every two days

15 May 2018 Astronomy Now

Australian astronomers have found one of the fastest-growing super-massive black holes in the known universe, a monster 20-billion-solar-mass quasi-stellar object consuming the equivalent of the Sun’s mass every two days.

Astronomers shed light on formation of black holes and galaxies

28 December 2017 Astronomy Now

Stars forming in galaxies appear to be influenced by the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, but the mechanism of how that happens has not been clear to astronomers until now.

Found: The most distant supermassive black hole ever observed

6 December 2017 Astronomy Now

A team of astronomers have discovered the most-distant supermassive black hole ever observed. It resides in a luminous quasar and its light reaches us from when the Universe was only 5 percent of its current age — just 690 million years after the Big Bang.

Gravitational wave kicks monster black hole out of galactic core

28 March 2017 Astronomy Now

Astronomers have uncovered a supermassive black hole that has been propelled out of the centre of a distant galaxy by what could be the awesome power of gravitational waves.

Supermassive black hole found in an unlikely place

7 April 2016 Astronomy Now

A near-record 17-billion-solar-mass black hole discovered in a sparse area of the local universe indicates that these monster objects may be more common than once thought. The newly discovered supermassive black hole is in NGC 1600, an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Eridanus some 149 million light-years away.

New research shows quasars slowed pace of star formation

24 March 2016 Astronomy Now

Galaxies reached their busiest star-making pace about 11 billion years ago, then slowed down. Scientists have puzzled for years over the question of what happened. Now researchers have found evidence supporting the argument that the answer was energy feedback from quasars within the galaxies where stars are born.

Clocking the rotation rate of a supermassive black hole

11 March 2016 Astronomy Now

A recent observational campaign involving more than two dozen optical telescopes and NASA’s space-based SWIFT X-ray telescope allowed a team of astronomers to measure very accurately the rotational rate of one of the most massive black holes in the universe. The black hole powers a quasar called OJ 287 which lies about 3.5 billion light-years away from Earth.

The sleeping giant in elliptical galaxy NGC 4889

11 February 2016 Astronomy Now

The placid appearance of NGC 4889 can fool the unsuspecting observer. But the elliptical galaxy, pictured here in front of hundreds of background galaxies, and deeply embedded within the Coma galaxy cluster in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, harbours a dark secret. At its heart lurks one of the most massive black holes ever discovered.