LIKE the crumbling turrets of a fairy-tale castle, three spires emerge from a greenish haze, their tops spraying out blue streamers of light. Bright stars shine through the gaseous crenellations, outlines framed in stark yellow. The image in which they feature may seem like a work of pure fantasy, but this misty fortress is very real. It is an area of the Eagle Nebula called the Pillars of Creation, a massive stellar nursery 4 light years across and 7000 light years away .
Many things are taking place:
Black Hole Images | First Sighting of Black Hole from Deep Space
Far off in a distant corner of the solar system, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is zipping around its target, the asteroid Bennu, in preparation for a monumental moment. Later this year, it will swing down onto the asteroid and scoop up a sample of rock, dust, and ice. Until then, its instruments are locked on the rocky body, recording critical observations.
One instrument, the Regolith X-Ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS), is trained to measure X-rays that bounce off the asteroid after it's bombarded by solar radiation. Last year, a group of students at MIT and Harvard who monitor that instrument spotted something strange peeking out from behind the asteroid: the flare of a black hole.
OSIRIS-REx Students Catch Unexpected Glimpse of Black Hole | NASA
Shedding new light on black hole ejections
The black hole, due to its strong gravitational pull, syphons material from its companion star and accretes (accumulates) it. "Most important to this work is the fact that the material is not all lost into the black hole. Outflows are launched away from the black hole at extreme velocities—almost the speed of light—and can be observed with radio telescopes," said Joe Bright, a DPhil student at Oxford University's Department of Physics.
The group in Oxford, along with international collaborators, led an extensive observing campaign on this particular system, known as MAXI J1820+070 after it went into outburst in the summer of 2018.
Quite a lot has been going on:
West Side grad behind first-ever picture of black hole gives Purdue behind-the-scenes look
As it turns out, if we were to build a single telescope that could start to make out the image of M87, the recently captured black hole, that one telescope would have to be approximately the size of Earth.
So scientists from around the world, including Katie Bouman, a West Lafayette High School graduate and part of the team who captured the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019, set out with the job to combine data from existing telescopes from around the world to come up with the image.
Record-Breaking, Gargantuan Black Hole Eruption – Biggest Explosion Seen in the Universe
This extremely powerful eruption occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, which is located about 390 million light-years from Earth. Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the Universe held together by gravity, containing thousands of individual galaxies, dark matter, and hot gas. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Naval Research Lab/Giacintucci, S.; XMM:ESA/XMM; Radio: NCRA/TIFR/GMRTN; Infrared: 2MASS/UMass/IPAC-Caltech/NASA/NSF
Astronomers made this discovery using X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton, and radio data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) in Australia and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India.
New telescope observations shed new light on black hole ejections -- ScienceDaily
A black hole, ejecting material at close to the speed of light, has been observed using e-MERLIN, the UK's radio telescope array based at Jodrell Bank Observatory.
A research team based at Oxford University used e-MERLIN, as well as the VLA and MeerKAT telescopes based in the US and South Africa respectively, to track the ejecting material over a period of months.
The observations have allowed a deeper understanding into how black holes feed energy into their environment. Co-lead of the project, and author on the paper appearing in Nature Astronomy, Rob Fender said "We've been studying these kind of jets for over 20 years and never have we tracked them so beautifully over such a large distance."
Students find new black hole using NASA asteroid probe data
The REXIS instrument installed on OSIRIS-REx detected the distant black hole during an observation attempt long before it arrived at the asteroid. It spotted x-rays being emitted from a previously undiscovered object some 30,000 light-years away. After additional study, that newfound object is now believed to be a black hole.
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The glowing object turned out to be a newly flaring black hole X-ray binary – discovered just a week earlier by Japan's MAXI telescope – designated MAXI J0637-430. NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) telescope also identified the X-ray blast a few days later.
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