The most luminous galaxy ever discovered shines brilliantly in infrared. This is likely due to a quickly forming supermassive black hole in its center.
Hungry Hungry Hippo
In an earlier post I talked about ultraluminous x-ray sources, and how they are typically powered by stellar-mass black holes. The source of these intense x-rays is the superheated material surrounding the black hole. By observing the intensity of the x-rays, we can get a handle on just how much mass a black hole is actively accumulating. The x-ray intensity has …
Take It to the Limit
Yesterday I mentioned that hypernovae (super-supernovae) are the result of the explosion of a star that’s about as massive as a star can be (about 150-200 solar masses). But how exactly do we know that this is an upper limit?
Unlimited
In 1916, Eddington demonstrated that there was a limit to how bright a stable star could be, known as the Eddington limit. Now a new paper shows that black holes can generate more energy than that limit would imply.