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Check Out This Incredible X-Ray 'Superbubble' That's Nearly 5,000 Light-Years Wide

This incredible image shows a pair of “nuclear superbubbles,” one over 4,900 light-years across and the other over 3,500 light-years. They’re emanating from the center of the galaxy NGC 3079, likely the result of a central black hole consuming matter and spewing it back out.

gizmodo.com|Ryan F. Mandelbaum

As with lots of the wild-looking things happening in space, these bubbles might be a potential source of the high-energy particles called cosmic rays that strike Earth from outer space. They might even be a source of those cosmic rays whose energies are too high to be accelerated by a single supernova, according to the paper published in the The Astrophysical Journal. The energies and locations of the x-rays demonstrate that the particle acceleration occurred at the outer rim of the bubble, rather than at the center of the galaxy.

We may be on the cusp of seeing one thanks to the Event Horizon Telescope, but back in 1979, Jean-Pierre Luminet created the first "image" using nothing but an early computer, lots of math and India ink.

The result is an image that still holds up and is closer to reality than the CGI done by Interstellar's whiz kids. What's more, subsequent computer simulations created by NASA Goddard and others still show the same defining elements -- a thin "photon ring" at the center, Doppler and Einstin-shifted light and a double accretion disk caused by gravitational lensing. Not bad for someone with just punch cards and India ink.

Astronomers have spotted a supermassive black hole containing 17 billion times the mass of the sun—only slightly smaller than the heftiest known black hole, which weighs in at a maximum of 21 billion solar masses—at the center of the galaxy NGC 1600.

That's a surprise, because NGC 1600, which lies 200 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus, belongs to an average-size galaxy group, and the monster black holes discovered to date tend to be found in dense clusters of galaxies. So researchers may have to rethink their ideas about where gigantic black holes reside, and how many of them might populate the universe, study team members said. [The Strangest Black Holes in Space]

Astronomers have identified a mammoth black hole weighing as much as 12 billion suns.

It's not the biggest black hole ever found, but it's astonishingly young. The giant appears to have swelled to its enormous size only 875 million years after the big bang, when the universe was just 6 percent of its current age. That's a surprise, astronomers report Wednesday in the journal Nature, because giant black holes are thought to grow relatively slowly by vacuuming up gas and even stars that venture too close.