The European Space Agency’s orbiting XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has proved the existence of a ‘gravitational vortex’ around a black hole. The discovery, aided by NASA’s NuSTAR mission, solves a mystery that has eluded astronomers for more than 30 years and will allow them to map the behaviour of matter very close to black holes.
Japan’s doomed Hitomi observatory peeled back a veil on the inner workings of the Perseus cluster of galaxies before the satellite spun out of control earlier this year, revealing in unprecedented detail how gas heated to millions of degrees behaves around an unseen supermassive black hole, scientists said.
An international team of astronomers used European Southern Observatory telescopes to complement other earth- and space-based instruments as part of the XXL survey of galaxy clusters. The ESO team measured the precise distances to the galaxy clusters, providing the 3-D view of the cosmos required to perform accurate measurements of dark matter and dark energy.
A newly released image from the ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray satellite observatory gives us a unprecedented look at the intense processes taking place at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy. The new study, which spans a thousand light-years, is a compilation of one and a half months of monitoring, revealing the powerful remnants of dead stars and their mighty action on the surrounding gas.
On 15 June 2015, a long-time acquaintance of X-ray and gamma ray astronomers made its comeback to the cosmic stage: V404 Cygni, a system comprising a black hole and a star orbiting one another. It is located in our Milky Way galaxy, almost 8,000 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.
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