13 Billion-Year-Old Quasars !
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have made groundbreaking observations of supermassive black hole-powered quasars dating back 13 billion years.
Black holes use gravity to pull matter into them.
NASA/Chandra X-ray Observatory/M.Weiss via AP
Cygnus X-1,
Cygnus X-1 is located near large active regions of star formation in the Milky Way, as seen in this image that spans some 700 light years across.
An artist's illustration on the right depicts what astronomers think is happening within the Cygnus X-1 system. Cygnus X-1 is a so-called stellar-mass black hole, a class of black holes that comes from the collapse of a massive star.
New studies with data from Chandra and several other telescopes have determined the black hole's spin, mass, and distance with unprecedented accuracy.
Optical image from the Digitized Sky Survey
"Milky Way black hole"
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, who produced the first ever image of our Milky Way black hole released in 2022, has captured a new view of the massive object at the center of our Galaxy: how it looks in polarized light.
This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarization, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of Sagittarius A*.
This image shows the polarized view of the Milky Way black hole. The lines mark the orientation of polarization, which is related to the magnetic field around the shadow of the black hole. Image
Photo: EHT Collaboration, CC-BY-NC-SA
Corona !
The corona of a supermassive black hole appears as pale, conical swirls above the accretion disk in this illustration. Credit: NASA/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State Univ.)
Black Holes Visualization !
If you could look at a black hole that’s pulling in material, you would see thin rings of light at the edge of the black hole’s shadow. They are actually multiple, highly distorted images of its accretion disk.
Gig Courtesy of @NASAUniverse
Universe Astrophysics
Shockwaves Art Concept §
“Stephan’s Quintet”
40 million light-years from Earth.
The new images illuminate the gravitational pull among the galaxies and “outflow” from a black hole.
Image produced by NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute via Webb Space Telescope
An artist's impression of a powerful supernova explosion.
Astronomers have discovered that a supernova found in 2018 likely marked the birth of a black hole or neutron star.
G.BACON STSCI/ESA/NASA
Artist's impression of a quasar like P172 + 18.
A central supermassive black hole attracts neighboring gas. This swirls through an accretion disk at high speed into the black hole. The gas is heated to very high temperatures by friction, which leads to the release of intense UV radiation.
Twisted magnetic fields create focused jets above and below the accretion disk, which carry away part of the hot, ionized gas.
These jets are a source of the strong radio emission.
Image: ESO / M. Grain knife
Illustration of the galaxy called CQ4479.
The extremely active black hole at the galaxy’s center is consuming material so fast that the material is glowing as it spins into the black hole’s center, forming a luminous quasar.
Quasars create intense energy that was thought to halt all star birth and drive a lethal blow to a galaxy’s growth. But SOFIA found that the galaxy CQ4479 is surviving these monstrous forces, holding on to enough cold gas, shown around the edges in brown, to birth about 100 Sun-sized stars a year, shown in blue.
The discovery is causing scientists to re-think their theories of galactic evolution.
Credits: NASA/ Daniel Rutter
Artist’s impression of supernova 1993J.
Image by NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)
Quasar Tsunami!
Credits: NASA, ESA and J. Olmsted (STScI)
Jeremy Schnittman’s Visualization of a Black Hole,
Images courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Jeremy Schnittman