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Scientists Directly Measure Spin of Extremely Distant Supermassive Black Hole
A team of astrophysicists has directly measured the spin of a supermassive black hole in the quasar RX J1131-1231, located 6 billion light years away.
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Spacecraft heads for Pluto, taking along its discoverer's ashes
THE first space mission to Pluto contains an unusual piece of cargo: ashes from the cremated remains of Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer who discovered the outermost planet in 1930.
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A Black Hole Doesn't Die -- It Does Something A Lot Weirder
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Mysterious quasar sequence explained
Quasars are supermassive black holes that live at the center of distant massive galaxies. They shine as the most luminous beacons in the sky across the entire electromagnetic spectrum by rapidly accreting matter into their gravitationally inescapable centers
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Turbulent black holes: Fasten your seatbelts … gravity is about to get bumpy!
New research at Perimeter shows that gravitational fields around black holes might eddy and swirl.
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Is It Time to Accept That We're Alone in the Universe?
We have yet to discover any signs of aliens, a troubling observation that has led to much speculation. One possible solution to the Great Silence is that nobody's out there. It's a conclusion that sounds impossible to believe, but there may be something to it. Here's why we may be alone in the universe.
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Supermassive Black Holes Make Merging Galaxies Green
Green as a color can mean animal, vegetable or mineral. It is the stuff of crocodiles, chlorophyll and copper patina, the essence of serpentine or of snakes in the grass, the hue of a glacial lake, a stagnant pond and the Chicago River on St. Patrick’s Day. Green seems to be everywhere you look—everywhere, that is, but up. As ubiquitous as it is on Earth, green is almost entirely absent from the heavens. There are exceptions...
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What Kind of Object Can Survive a Close Encounter With a Monster Black Hole?
In or around May 2014, a truly remarkable thing happened: An object, dubbed G2, survived a very close encounter with a very large black hole. The black hole in this case is the supermassive one in the center of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Our best estimate...
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Unforgettable Hubble Space Telescope Photos
On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, we asked astronomers and others involved in the telescope’s groundbreaking story to tell us about their favorite images.
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How a Galaxy Can Get Booted From Its Home
Cosmic collisions may slingshot tiny galaxies into intergalactic space.
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LightSail spacecraft set for first test flight
It's time to go space sailin'! The LightSail is on schedule for its first test flight later this month.
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Brightest Galaxy in the Universe Found
A newfound galaxy 12.5 billion light-years from Earth is the most luminous one known in the universe, blazing more brightly than 300 trillion suns. The engine behind the galaxy's brilliance may be a supermassive black hole, researchers said.
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Rosetta space orbiter to be moved closer to Philae lander comet
Mission will improve contact between orbiter and Philae lander after agency says data already received is ‘amazingly exciting’
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Rosetta: Spacecraft Reveals Sinkholes On Comet's Surface
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the comet being orbited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, has puzzled scientists with deep, almost perfectly circular pits on the it’s surface, since the probe reached the comet in August 2014. A new study analyzing close-up images taken by Rosetta suggests that these pits are sinkholes, formed when ice beneath the …
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NuSTAR Stares Deep into Hidden Lairs of Black Holes
The high-energy X-ray eyes of NASA's NuSTAR have peered into some of the most heavily buried supermassive black holes known.
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The Telescope of the 2030s
In what they termed “a call to arms,” an organization of American university astronomers said last week that NASA should begin planning now to launch a sort of supersize version of the Hubble Space Telescope in the 2030s to look for life beyond Earth. This High Definition Space Telescope would be five times as big and 100 times as sensitive as the Hubble, with a mirror nearly 40 feet in diameter, and would orbit the sun about a million miles from Earth.
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Giant Mystery Ring of Galaxies Should Not Exist
Astronomers have announced the discovery of a truly monstrous structure consisting of a ring of galaxies around 5 billion light-years across — and it defies cosmological theory.
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Hubble finds supernovae in "wrong place at wrong time" | Astronomy.com
In a complicated mystery of double star systems, merging galaxies, and twin black holes, astronomers are explaining a series of unusual supernovae found beyond the typical confines of their galaxies.
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Celestial firework marks nearest galaxy
A spectacular bull’s-eye collision that has resulted in a ring galaxy has been discovered lurking behind the Milky Way.
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First evidence of galaxy metamorphosis detected
Many galaxies in the universe have undergone a dramatic transformation from flat discs into spherical shapes over the past 8 billion years or so, say researchers.
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