Active galactic nucleus

Our Sun is about 330,000 times the mass of Earth, yet it is dwarfed by the black holes that lurk at the centers of galaxies. A team of astronomers recently found the fastest-growing of this group: a 17-billion solar mass black hole in the distant universe, which is growing at the rate of one solar mass per day.Why Bitcoin won’t reach $1,000,000The black hole is actually a quasar, aka an actively feeding black hole at the center of a galaxy. When quasars accrete matter—which is to say, as their strong gravitational fields…

Black holes often sit at the centers of galaxies, where they can gorge themselves on the superheated material that falls into their abyssal event horizons. Now, a team of astronomers have observed the beginning of one such meal.Will We See More of Uhura's Relationship with Spock? | io9 InterviewThe feast was found in a galaxy a staggering 10 billion light-years from Earth. The meal itself—or what the astronomers think is a black hole’s meal—is a luminous transient, meaning an object that changes in brightness quickly. It…

Over 20,000 galaxies glimmer in this sweeping view of the sky between the constellations of Pisces and Andromeda. But more than just an arresting sight, the view has helped astronomers determine what sparked the Epoch of Reionization, the period when the opaque universe gave way to the transparent one.First Full-Color Images From Webb Space TelescopeThe earliest days of the universe were cloaked in a dense gas that limited the amount light could travel through it. During the Epoch of Reionization—when the universe was…

A team of astrophysicists say quasars, some of the most brilliant phenomena in the universe, are likely caused by collisions between galaxies.First Full-Color Images From Webb Space TelescopeQuasars are a type of active galactic nuclei; they lurk at the centers of galaxies and are very bright, often launching material outward in superheated jets of material. But for decades, astrophysicists have not known what gives rise to quasars.Now, a group of scientists propose that quasars emerge from the gravitational forces at…

The hits keep coming from Webb Space Telescope, which has now spotted a rainbow “knot” consisting of an extremely red quasar and a snarl of massive galaxies that existed about 11.5 billion years ago.The remarkable image comes just a day after the telescope’s first view of the iconic Pillars of Creation, in a redux of the image of the gas clouds so famously capturedby the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995.Quasars are energetic centers of galaxies that appear very bright in the night sky. Quasars have supermassive black holes…