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Has ESA's GAIA spacecraft discovered the missing link in Black Holes?


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    • By NASA
      Quasar H1821+643.X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Nottingham/H. Russell et al.; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk This image shows a quasar, a rapidly growing supermassive black hole, which is not achieving what astronomers would expect from it, as reported in our latest press release. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue) and radio data from the NSF’s Karl G. Jansky’s Very Large Array (red) reveal some of the evidence for this quasar’s disappointing impact on its host galaxy.
      Known as H1821+643, this quasar is about 3.4 billion light-years from Earth. Quasars are a rare and extreme class of supermassive black holes that are furiously pulling material inwards, producing intense radiation and sometimes powerful jets. H1821+643 is the closest quasar to Earth in a cluster of galaxies.
      Quasars are different than other supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxy clusters in that they are pulling in more material at a higher rate. Astronomers have found that non-quasar black holes growing at moderate rates influence their surroundings by preventing the intergalactic hot gas from cooling down too much. This regulates the growth of stars around the black hole.
      The influence of quasars, however, is not as well known. This new study of H1821+643 that quasars — despite being so active — may be less important in driving the fate of their host galaxy and cluster than some scientists might expect.
      To reach this conclusion the team used Chandra to study the hot gas that H1821+643 and its host galaxy are shrouded in. The bright X-rays from the quasar, however, made it difficult to study the weaker X-rays from the hot gas. The researchers carefully removed the X-ray glare to reveal what the black hole’s influence is, which is reflected in the new composite image showing X-rays from hot gas in the cluster surrounding the quasar. This allowed them to see that the quasar is actually having little effect on its surroundings.
      Using Chandra, the team found that the density of gas near the black hole in the center of the galaxy is much higher, and the gas temperatures much lower, than in regions farther away. Scientists expect the hot gas to behave like this when there is little or no energy input (which would typically come from outbursts from a black hole) to prevent the hot gas from cooling down and flowing towards the center of the cluster.
      A paper describing these results has been accepted into the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and is available online. The authors are Helen Russell (University of Nottingham, UK), Paul Nulsen (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian), Andy Fabian (University of Cambridge, UK), Thomas Braben (University of Nottingham), Niel Brandt (Penn State University), Lucy Clews (University of Nottingham), Michael McDonald (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Christopher Reynolds (University of Maryland), Jeremy Saunders (Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Research), and Sylvain Veilleux (University of Maryland).
      NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science from Cambridge Massachusetts and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
      Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
      For more Chandra images, multimedia and related materials, visit:
      https://www.nasa.gov/mission/chandra-x-ray-observatory/
      Visual Description:
      This composite image shows a quasar, a rare and extreme class of supermassive black hole, that’s located about 3.4 billion light-years from Earth.
      At the center of the image is a bright, white, circular light, similar to the beam of a flashlight if it was pointed directly toward you. A fuzzy, bar-shaped structure of red-colored radio light, slightly larger than the width of the white light, surrounds the circular structure. The red bar also extends above and below the white light, stretching in a somewhat straight line from about the one o’clock position to the seven o’clock position on a clock face.
      On either side of the red bar, X-ray light is present as blue, wispy clouds of hot gas that are brighter closer to the red and white features. The brighter clouds represent more dense gas.
      News Media Contact
      Megan Watzke
      Chandra X-ray Center
      Cambridge, Mass.
      617-496-7998
      Jonathan Deal
      Marshall Space Flight Center
      Huntsville, Ala.
      256-544-0034
      View the full article
    • By European Space Agency
      ESA’s Gaia space telescope has further disentangled the history of our galaxy, discovering two surprising streams of stars that formed and wove together over 12 billion years ago.
      View the full article
    • By European Space Agency
      Image: Astronomers have created the largest yet cosmic 3D map of quasars: bright and active centres of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes. This map shows the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, with the furthest shining bright when the Universe was only 1.5 billion years old.
      The new map has been made with data from ESA’s Gaia space telescope. While Gaia’s main objective is to map the stars in our own galaxy, in the process of scanning the sky it also spots objects outside the Milky Way, such as quasars and other galaxies.
      The graphic representation of the map (bottom right on the infographic) shows us the location of quasars from our vantage point, the centre of the sphere. The regions empty of quasars are where the disc of our galaxy blocks our view.
      Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies and can be hundreds of times as bright as an entire galaxy. As the black hole’s gravitational pull spins up nearby gas, the process generates an extremely bright disk, and sometimes jets of light, that telescopes can observe.
      The galaxies that quasars live in sit inside massive clouds of invisible dark matter. The distribution of dark matter gives insight into how much dark matter there is in the Universe, and how strong it clusters. Astronomers compare these measurements across cosmic time to test our current model of the Universe's composition and evolution.
      Because quasars are so bright, astronomers use them to map out the dark matter in the very distant Universe, and fill in the timeline of how the cosmos evolved.
      For example, scientists have already compared the new quasar map with the cosmic microwave background, a snapshot of the oldest light in our cosmos. As this light travels to us, it is bent by the intervening web of dark matter – the same web mapped out by the quasars – and by comparing the two, scientists can measure how strongly matter clumps together through time.
      This map was made by Kate Storey-Fisher of the Donostia International Physics Center in Spain and the New York University, USA, and colleagues, and published in the Astrophysical Journal. It uses data from Gaia’s third data release, which contained 6.6 million quasar candidates, as well as data from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Combining the datasets helped clean Gaia’s original dataset of contaminants such as stars and galaxies, and better pinpoint the distances to the quasars. The team also created a map of where dust, stars and other phenomena are expected to block our view of some quasars, which is critical for interpreting the quasar map.
      View the full article
    • By European Space Agency
      View the full article
    • By NASA
      4 min read
      What Are Hubble and Webb Observing Right Now? NASA Tool Has the Answer
      It’s not hard to find out what NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have observed in the past. Barely a week goes by without news of a cosmic discovery made possible using images, spectra, and other data captured by NASA’s prolific astronomical observatories. 
      But what are Hubble and Webb looking at right this minute? A shadowy pillar harboring nascent stars? A pair of colliding galaxies? The atmosphere of a distant planet? Galactic light, stretched and distorted on a 13-billion-year journey across space?
      NASA’s Space Telescope Live, a web application originally developed in 2016 to deliver real-time updates on Hubble targets, now affords easy access to up-to-date information on current, past, and upcoming observations from both Hubble and Webb. 
      Designed and developed for NASA by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, this exploratory tool offers the public a straightforward and engaging way to learn more about how astronomical investigations are carried out.
      With its redesigned user interface and expanded functionality, users can find out not only what planet, star, nebula, galaxy, or region of deep space each telescope is observing at the moment, but also where exactly these targets are in the sky; what scientific instruments are being used to capture the images, spectra, and other data; precisely when and how long the observations are scheduled to occur; the status of the observation; who is leading the research; and most importantly, what the scientists are trying to find out. 
      Information for observations from approved science programs is available via the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes. NASA’s Space Telescope Live offers easy access to this information – not only the current day’s targets, but the entire catalog of past observations as well – with Webb records dating back to its first commissioning targets in January 2022, and Hubble records all the way back to the beginning of its operations in May 1990. 
      The zoomable sky map centered on the target’s location was developed using the Aladin Sky Atlas, with imagery from ground-based telescopes to provide context for the observation. (Because the Hubble and Webb data must go through preliminary processing, and in many cases preliminary analysis, before being released to the public and astronomy community, real-time imagery is not available in this tool for either telescope.)
      Details such as target name and coordinates, scheduled start and end times, and the research topic, are pulled directly from the observation scheduling and proposal planning databases. Links within the tool direct users to the original research proposal, which serves as a gateway to more technical information. 
      While this latest version of NASA’s Space Telescope Live constitutes a significant transformation from the previous release, the team is already gathering feedback from users and planning additional enhancements to provide opportunities for deeper exploration and understanding.  
      NASA’s Space Telescope Live is designed to work on desktop and mobile devices, and is accessible via NASA’s official Hubble and Webb websites. Additional details about the content, including public-friendly explanations of the information displayed in the tool, can be found in the User Guide.
      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 the Canadian Space Agency.
      The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. Goddard also conducts mission operations with Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, Colorado. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations for NASA.
      Learn More:

      Selecting What Webb Observes Next

      Media Contacts:
      Claire Andreoli – claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
      Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov
      NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
      Margaret W. Carruthers, Christine Pulliam
      Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
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      Last Updated Mar 06, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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