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Spitzer Leads NASA's Great Observatories to Uncover Black Holes, Other Hidden Objects in the Distant Universe
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA, JAXA XRISM Mission Looks Deeply Into ‘Hidden’ Stellar System
The Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) observatory has captured the most detailed portrait yet of gases flowing within Cygnus X-3, one of the most studied sources in the X-ray sky.
Cygnus X-3 is a binary that pairs a rare type of high-mass star with a compact companion — likely a black hole.
Cygnus X-3 is a high-mass binary consisting of a compact object (likely a black hole) and a hot Wolf-Rayet star. This artist’s concept shows one interpretation of the system. High-resolution X-ray spectroscopy indicates two gas components: a heavy background outflow, or wind, emanating from the massive star and a turbulent structure — perhaps a wake carved into the wind — located close to the orbiting companion. As shown here, a black hole’s gravity captures some of the wind into an accretion disk around it, and the disk’s orbital motion sculpts a path (yellow arc) through the streaming gas. During strong outbursts, the companion emits jets of particles moving near the speed of light, seen here extending above and below the black hole. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center “The nature of the massive star is one factor that makes Cygnus X-3 so intriguing,” said Ralf Ballhausen, a postdoctoral associate at the University of Maryland, College Park, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s a Wolf-Rayet star, a type that has evolved to the point where strong outflows called stellar winds strip gas from the star’s surface and drive it outward. The compact object sweeps up and heats some of this gas, causing it to emit X-rays.”
A paper describing the findings, led by Ballhausen, will appear in a future edition of The Astrophysical Journal.
“For XRISM, Cygnus X-3 is a Goldilocks target — its brightness is ‘just right’ in the energy range where XRISM is especially sensitive,” said co-author Timothy Kallman, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard. “This unusual source has been studied by every X-ray satellite ever flown, so observing it is a kind of rite of passage for new X-ray missions.”
XRISM (pronounced “crism”) is led by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) in collaboration with NASA, along with contributions from ESA (European Space Agency). NASA and JAXA developed the mission’s microcalorimeter spectrometer instrument, named Resolve.
Observing Cygnus X-3 for 18 hours in late March, Resolve acquired a high-resolution spectrum that allows astronomers to better understand the complex gas dynamics operating there. These include outflowing gas produced by a hot, massive star, its interaction with the compact companion, and a turbulent region that may represent a wake produced by the companion as it orbits through the outrushing gas.
XRISM’s Resolve instrument has captured the most detailed X-ray spectrum yet acquired of Cygnus X-3. Peaks indicate X-rays emitted by ionized gases, and valleys form where the gases absorb X-rays; many lines are also shifted to both higher and lower energies by gas motions. Top: The full Resolve spectrum, from 2 to 8 keV (kiloelectron volts), tracks X-rays with thousands of times the energy of visible light. Some lines are labeled with the names of the elements that produced them, such as sulfur, argon, and calcium, along with Roman numerals that refer to the number of electrons these atoms have lost. Bottom: A zoom into a region of the spectrum often dominated by features produced by transitions in the innermost electron shell (K shell) of iron atoms. These features form when the atoms interact with high-energy X-rays or electrons and respond by emitting a photon at energies between 6.4 and 7 keV. These details, clearly visible for the first time with XRISM’s Resolve instrument, will help astronomers refine their understanding of this unusual system. JAXA/NASA/XRISM Collaboration In Cygnus X-3, the star and compact object are so close they complete an orbit in just 4.8 hours. The binary is thought to lie about 32,000 light-years away in the direction of the northern constellation Cygnus.
While thick dust clouds in our galaxy’s central plane obscure any visible light from Cygnus X-3, the binary has been studied in radio, infrared, and gamma-ray light, as well as in X-rays.
The system is immersed in the star’s streaming gas, which is illuminated and ionized by X-rays from the compact companion. The gas both emits and absorbs X-rays, and many of the spectrum’s prominent peaks and valleys incorporate both aspects. Yet a simple attempt at understanding the spectrum comes up short because some of the features appear to be in the wrong place.
That’s because the rapid motion of the gas displaces these features from their normal laboratory energies due to the Doppler effect. Absorption valleys typically shift up to higher energies, indicating gas moving toward us at speeds of up to 930,000 mph (1.5 million kph). Emission peaks shift down to lower energies, indicating gas moving away from us at slower speeds.
Some spectral features displayed much stronger absorption valleys than emission peaks. The reason for this imbalance, the team concludes, is that the dynamics of the stellar wind allow the moving gas to absorb a broader range of X-ray energies emitted by the companion. The detail of the XRISM spectrum, particularly at higher energies rich in features produced by ionized iron atoms, allowed the scientists to disentangle these effects.
“A key to acquiring this detail was XRISM’s ability to monitor the system over the course of several orbits,” said Brian Williams, NASA’s project scientist for the mission at Goddard. “There’s much more to explore in this spectrum, and ultimately we hope it will help us determine if Cygnus X-3’s compact object is indeed a black hole.”
XRISM is a collaborative mission between JAXA and NASA, with participation by ESA. NASA’s contribution includes science participation from CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Download additional images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Francis Reddy
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 25, 2024 Related Terms
Black Holes Electromagnetic Spectrum Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research Goddard Space Flight Center Stars Stellar-mass Black Holes The Universe X-ray Binaries XRISM (X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) Facebook logo @NASAUniverse @NASAUniverse Instagram logo @NASAUniverse Keep Exploring Discover Related Topics
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By NASA
2 Min Read Why NASA Is a Great Place to Launch Your Career
Students at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory pose for photos around the laboratory wearing their eclipse glasses. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech Recently recognized as the most prestigious internship program by Vault.com, NASA has empowered countless students and early-career professionals to launch careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. NASA interns make real contributions to space and science missions, making it one of the best places to start your career.
“NASA internships give students the chance to work on groundbreaking projects alongside experts, providing impactful opportunities for professional growth,” said Mike Kincaid, associate administrator for NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement. “Since starting my career as an intern at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, I’ve experienced firsthand how NASA creates lasting connections and open doors—not just for me, but for former interns who are now colleagues across the agency. These internships build STEM skills, confidence, and networks, preparing the next generation of innovators and leaders.”
NASA interns achieve impressive feats, from discovering new exoplanets to becoming astronauts and even winning Webby Awards for their science communication efforts. These valuable contributors play a crucial role in NASA’s mission to explore the unknown for the benefit of all. Many NASA employees start their careers as interns, a testament to the program’s lasting impact.
Students congratulate the 23rd astronaut class at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on March 5, 2024.NASA/Josh Valcarcel Additionally, NASA is recognized as one of America’s Best Employers for Women and one of America’s Best Employers for New Graduates by Forbes, reflecting the agency’s commitment to fostering a diverse and inclusive environment. NASA encourages people from underrepresented groups to apply, creating a diverse cohort of interns who bring a wide range of perspectives and ideas to the agency.
“My internship experience has been incredible. I have felt welcomed by everyone I’ve worked with, which has been so helpful as a Navajo woman as I’ve often felt like an outsider in male-dominated STEM spaces,” said Tara Roanhorse, an intern for NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement.
If you’re passionate about space, technology, and making a difference in the world, NASA’s internship program is the perfect place to begin your journey toward a fulfilling and impactful career.
To learn more about NASA’s internship programs, visit: https://www.intern.nasa.gov/
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By NASA
At NASA, high-end computing is essential for many agency missions. This technology helps us advance our understanding of the universe – from our planet to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Supercomputers enable projects across diverse research, such as making discoveries about the Sun’s activity that affects technologies in space and life on Earth, building artificial intelligence-based models for innovative weather and climate science, and helping redesign the launch pad that will send astronauts to space with Artemis II.
These projects are just a sample of the many on display in NASA’s exhibit during the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, or SC24. NASA’s Dr. Nicola “Nicky” Fox, associate administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, will deliver the keynote address, “NASA’s Vision for High Impact Science and Exploration,” on Tuesday, Nov. 19, where she’ll share more about the ways NASA uses supercomputing to explore the universe for the benefit of all. Here’s a little more about the work NASA will share at the conference:
1. Simulations Help in Redesign of the Artemis Launch Environment
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This simulation of the Artemis I launch shows how the Space Launch System rocket's exhaust plumes interact with the air, water, and the launchpad. Colors on surfaces indicate pressure levels—red for high pressure and blue for low pressure. The teal contours illustrate where water is present. NASA/Chris DeGrendele, Timothy Sandstrom Researchers at NASA Ames are helping ensure astronauts launch safely on the Artemis II test flight, the first crewed mission of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft, scheduled for 2025. Using the Launch Ascent and Vehicle Aerodynamics software, they simulated the complex interactions between the rocket plume and the water-based sound suppression system used during the Artemis I launch, which resulted in damage to the mobile launcher platform that supported the rocket before liftoff.
Comparing simulations with and without the water systems activated revealed that the sound suppression system effectively reduces pressure waves, but exhaust gases can redirect water and cause significant pressure increases.
The simulations, run on the Aitken supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at Ames, generated about 400 terabytes of data. This data was provided to aerospace engineers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, who are redesigning the flame deflector and mobile launcher for the Artemis II launch.
2. Airplane Design Optimization for Fuel Efficiency
In this comparison of aircraft designs, the left wing models the aircraft’s initial geometry, while the right wing models an optimized shape. The surface is colored by the air pressure on the aircraft, with orange surfaces representing shock waves in the airflow. The optimized design modeled on the right wing reduces drag by 4% compared to the original, leading to improved fuel efficiency. NASA/Brandon Lowe To help make commercial flight more efficient and sustainable, researchers and engineers at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley are working to refine aircraft designs to reduce air resistance, or drag, by fine-tuning the shape of wings, fuselages, and other aircraft structural components. These changes would lower the energy required for flight and reduce the amount of fuel needed, produce fewer emissions, enhance overall performance of aircraft, and could help reduce noise levels around airports.
Using NASA’s Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics computational modeling software, developed at Ames, researchers are leveraging the power of agency supercomputers to run hundreds of simulations to explore a variety of design possibilities – on existing aircraft and future vehicle concepts. Their work has shown the potential to reduce drag on an existing commercial aircraft design by 4%, translating to significant fuel savings in real-world applications.
3. Applying AI to Weather and Climate
This visualization compares the track of the Category 4 hurricane, Ida, from MERRA-2 reanalysis data (left) with a prediction made without specific training, from NASA and IBM’s Prithvi WxC foundation model (right). Both models were initialized at 00 UTC on 2021-08-27.The University of Alabama in Huntsville/Ankur Kumar; NASA/Sujit Roy Traditional weather and climate models produce global and regional results by solving mathematical equations for millions of small areas (grid boxes) across Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. NASA and partners are now exploring newer approaches using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to train a foundation model.
Foundation models are developed using large, unlabeled datasets so researchers can fine-tune results for different applications, such as creating forecasts or predicting weather patterns or climate changes, independently with minimal additional training.
NASA developed the open source, publicly available Prithvi Weather-Climate foundation model (Prithvi WxC), in collaboration with IBM Research. Prithvi WxC was pretrained using 160 variables from NASA’s Modern-era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA-2) dataset on the newest NVIDIA A100 GPUs at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility.
Armed with 2.3 billion parameters, Prithvi WxC can model a variety of weather and climate phenomena – such as hurricane tracks – at fine resolutions. Applications include targeted weather prediction and climate projection, as well as representing physical processes like gravity waves.
4. Simulations and AI Reveal the Fascinating World of Neutron Stars
3D simulation of pulsar magnetospheres, run on NASA’s Aitken supercomputer using data from the agency‘s Fermi space telescope. The red arrow shows the direction of the star’s magnetic field. Blue lines trace high-energy particles, producing gamma rays, in yellow. Green lines represent light particles hitting the observer’s plane, illustrating how Fermi detects pulsar gamma rays. NASA/Constantinos Kalapotharakos To explore the extreme conditions inside neutron stars, researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, are using a blend of simulation, observation, and AI to unravel the mysteries of these extraordinary cosmic objects. Neutron stars are the dead cores of stars that have exploded and represent some of the densest objects in the universe.
Cutting-edge simulations, run on supercomputers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility, help explain phenomena observed by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) observatory. These phenomena include the rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron stars known as pulsars, whose detailed physical mechanisms have remained mysterious since their discovery. By applying AI tools such as deep neural networks, the scientists can infer the stars’ mass, radius, magnetic field structure, and other properties from data obtained by the NICER and Fermi observatories.
The simulations’ unprecedented results will guide similar studies of black holes and other space environments, as well as play a pivotal role in shaping future scientific space missions and mission concepts.
5. Modeling the Sun in Action – From Tiny to Large Scales
Image from a 3D simulation showing the evolution of flows in the upper layers of the Sun, with the most vigorous motions shown in red. These turbulent flows can generate magnetic fields and excite sound waves, shock waves, and eruptions. NASA/Irina Kitiashvili and Timothy A. Sandstrom The Sun’s activity, producing events such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections, influences the space environment and cause space weather disturbances that can interfere with satellite electronics, radio communications, GPS signals, and power grids on Earth. Scientists at NASA Ames produced highly realistic 3D models that – for the first time – allow them to examine the physics of solar plasma in action, from very small to very large scales. These models help interpret observations from NASA spacecraft like the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO).
Using NASA’s StellarBox code on supercomputers at NASA’s Advanced Supercomputing facility, the scientists improved our understanding of the origins of solar jets and tornadoes – bursts of extremely hot, charged plasma in the solar atmosphere. These models allow the science community to address long-standing questions of solar magnetic activity and how it affects space weather.
6. Scientific Visualization Makes NASA Data Understandable
This global map is a frame from an animation showing how wind patterns and atmospheric circulation moved carbon dioxide through Earth’s atmosphere from January to March 2020. The DYAMOND model’s high resolution shows unique sources of carbon dioxide emissions and how they spread across continents and oceans.NASA/Scientific Visualization Studio NASA simulations and observations can yield petabytes of data that are difficult to comprehend in their original form. The Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS), based at NASA Goddard, turns data into insight by collaborating closely with scientists to create cinematic, high-fidelity visualizations.
Key infrastructure for these SVS creations includes the NASA Center for Climate Simulation’s Discover supercomputer at Goddard, which hosts a variety of simulations and provides data analysis and image-rendering capabilities. Recent data-driven visualizations show a coronal mass ejection from the Sun hitting Earth’s magnetosphere using the Multiscale Atmosphere-Geospace Environment (MAGE) model; global carbon dioxide emissions circling the planet in the DYnamics of the Atmospheric general circulation Modeled On Non-hydrostatic Domains (DYAMOND) model; and representations of La Niña and El Niño weather patterns using the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) model.
For more information about NASA’s virtual exhibit at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, being held in Atlanta, Nov. 17-22, 2024, visit:
https://www.nas.nasa.gov/SC24
For more information about supercomputers run by NASA High-End Computing, visit:
https://hec.nasa.gov
For news media:
Members of the news media interested in covering this topic should reach out to the NASA Ames newsroom.
Authors: Jill Dunbar, Michelle Moyer, and Katie Pitta, NASA’s Ames Research Center; and Jarrett Cohen, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
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By NASA
This illustration shows a red, early-universe dwarf galaxy that hosts a rapidly feeding black hole at its center. Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers have discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani A rapidly feeding black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy in the early universe, shown in this artist’s concept, may hold important clues to the evolution of supermassive black holes in general.
Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole just 1.5 billion years after the big bang. The black hole is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.
Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate so soon after the birth of the universe, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early universe.
The black hole, called LID-568, was hidden among thousands of objects in the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS legacy survey, a catalog resulting from some 4.6 million Chandra observations. This population of galaxies is very bright in the X-ray light, but invisible in optical and previous near-infrared observations. By following up with Webb, astronomers could use the observatory’s unique infrared sensitivity to detect these faint counterpart emissions, which led to the discovery of the black hole.
The speed and size of these outflows led the team to infer that a substantial fraction of the mass growth of LID-568 may have occurred in a single episode of rapid accretion.
LID-568 appears to be feeding on matter at a rate 40 times its Eddington limit. This limit relates to the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can emit, as well as how fast it can absorb matter, such that its inward gravitational force and outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed, infalling matter remain in balance.
These results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from smaller black hole “seeds,” which current theories suggest arise either from the death of the universe’s first stars (light seeds) or the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds). Until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.
The new discovery suggests that “a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed,” said International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh, who led the research team.
A paper describing these results (“A super-Eddington-accreting black hole ~1.5 Gyr after the Big Bang observed with JWST”) appears in the journal Nature Astronomy.
About the Missions
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/chandra
https://chandra.si.edu
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Elizabeth Laundau
NASA Headquarters
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202-923-0167
elizabeth.r.landau@nasa.gov
Lane Figueroa
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Swift Studies Gas-Churning Monster Black Holes
A pair of monster black holes swirl in a cloud of gas in this artist’s concept of AT 2021hdr, a recurring outburst studied by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. NASA/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State University) Scientists using observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of a galaxy.
“It’s a very weird event, called AT 2021hdr, that keeps recurring every few months,” said Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, the Millennium Nucleus on Transversal Research and Technology to Explore Supermassive Black Holes, and University of Valparaíso in Chile. “We think that a gas cloud engulfed the black holes. As they orbit each other, the black holes interact with the cloud, perturbing and consuming its gas. This produces an oscillating pattern in the light from the system.”
A paper about AT 2021hdr, led by Hernández-García, was published Nov. 13 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The dual black holes are in the center of a galaxy called 2MASX J21240027+3409114, located 1 billion light-years away in the northern constellation Cygnus. The pair are about 16 billion miles (26 billion kilometers) apart, close enough that light only takes a day to travel between them. Together they contain 40 million times the Sun’s mass.
Scientists estimate the black holes complete an orbit every 130 days and will collide and merge in approximately 70,000 years.
AT 2021hdr was first spotted in March 2021 by the Caltech-led ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was flagged as a potentially interesting source by ALeRCE (Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events). This multidisciplinary team combines artificial intelligence tools with human expertise to report events in the night sky to the astronomical community using the mountains of data collected by survey programs like ZTF.
“Although this flare was originally thought to be a supernova, outbursts in 2022 made us think of other explanations,” said co-author Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia, an ALeRCE team member and astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile. “Each subsequent event has helped us refine our model of what’s going on in the system.”
Since the first flare, ZTF has detected outbursts from AT 2021hdr every 60 to 90 days.
Hernández-García and her team have been observing the source with Swift since November 2022. Swift helped them determine that the binary produces oscillations in ultraviolet and X-ray light on the same time scales as ZTF sees them in the visible range.
The researchers conducted a Goldilocks-type elimination of different models to explain what they saw in the data.
Initially, they thought the signal could be the byproduct of normal activity in the galactic center. Then they considered whether a tidal disruption event — the destruction of a star that wandered too close to one of the black holes — could be the cause.
Finally, they settled on another possibility, the tidal disruption of a gas cloud, one that was bigger than the binary itself. When the cloud encountered the black holes, gravity ripped it apart, forming filaments around the pair, and friction started to heat it. The gas got particularly dense and hot close to the black holes. As the binary orbits, the complex interplay of forces ejects some of the gas from the system on each rotation. These interactions produce the fluctuating light Swift and ZTF observe.
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Watch as a gas cloud encounters two supermassive black holes in this simulation. The complex interplay of gravitational and frictional forces causes the cloud to condense and heat. Some of the gas is ejected from the system with each orbit of the black holes. F. Goicovic et al. 2016 Hernández-García and her team plan to continue observations of AT 2021hdr to better understand the system and improve their models. They’re also interested in studying its home galaxy, which is currently merging with another one nearby — an event first reported in their paper.
“As Swift approaches its 20th anniversary, it’s incredible to see all the new science it’s still helping the community accomplish,” said S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There’s still so much it has left to teach us about our ever-changing cosmos.”
NASA’s missions are part of a growing, worldwide network watching for changes in the sky to solve mysteries of how the universe works.
Goddard manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.
Download high-resolution images and videos.
By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
301-286-1940
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 13, 2024 Editor Jeanette Kazmierczak Related Terms
Astrophysics Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research Goddard Space Flight Center Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory Science & Research Supermassive Black Holes The Universe View the full article
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