Lasers From Keck telescopes Discover Quirky Star Close To Middle Of Milky Method

 The powerful Lasers from the twin Keck telescopes of the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea point to the center of the Milky Way galaxy, where scientists have establish a second star orbiting a super massive black hole. Now a day’s Scientists using the Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea have originate a second star in a surprisingly fast orbit around the black hole at the middle of the Milky Way galaxy.

The discovery, published world today in the great journal Science, may help astronomers determine if Einstein was right in his fundamental calculation of how black holes warp space and time, said UCLA physicist Andrea Ghez, organizer of the discovery group.

The shining star, known as S0-102, orbits the black hole in 11.5 years, a virtual sprint that allows astronomers to study an entire orbit for perturbations that offer clues to the black hole’s structure. Let’s before this finding, astronomers knew of only 1 star near the black hole with a very short orbit: S0-2, which completes a circuit (CKT) in 16 years. Both are in the assemblage Sagittarius.

NASA's Chandra Finds Nearest Pair of Supermassive Black Holes

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon.

The black holes are located near the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3393. Separated by only 490 light years, the black holes are likely the remnant of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago.

"If this galaxy wasn't so close, we'd have no chance of separating the two black holes the way we have," said Pepi Fabbiano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., who led the study that appears in this week's online issue of the journal Nature. "Since this galaxy was right under our noses by cosmic standards, it makes us wonder how many of these black hole pairs we've been missing."

NASA's Chandra Observatory Images Gas Flowing Toward Black Hole

The flow of hot gas toward a black hole has been clearly imaged for the first time in X-rays. The observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory will help tackle two of the most fundamental problems in modern astrophysics: understanding how black holes grow and how matter behaves in their intense gravity.

The black hole is at the center of a large galaxy known as NGC 3115, which is located about 32 million light years from Earth. A large amount of previous data has shown material falling toward and onto black holes, but none with this clear a signature of hot gas.

By imaging the hot gas at different distances from this supermassive black hole, astronomers have observed a critical threshold where the motion of gas first becomes dominated by the black hole's gravity and falls inward. This distance from the black hole is known as the "Bondi radius."

NASA's Chandra Finds Massive Black Holes Common in Early Universe

Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

By pointing Chandra at a patch of sky for more than six weeks, astronomers obtained what is known as the Chandra Deep Field South (CDFS). When combined with very deep optical and infrared images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the new Chandra data allowed astronomers to search for black holes in 200 distant galaxies, from when the universe was between about 800 million to 950 million years old.

"Until now, we had no idea what the black holes in these early galaxies were doing, or if they even existed,” said Ezequiel Treister of the University of Hawaii, lead author of the study appearing in the June 16 issue of the journal Nature. “Now we know they are there, and they are growing like gangbusters."