Pluto is emitting x-rays, and we don’t know why.
When Two Become One
New observations support the idea that some supernovae are caused by the collision of white dwarf stars.
Brightening The Cosmic Background
When the jets of a black hole interact with the cosmic microwave background, something brilliant can occur.
A Black Hole With Flare
Much of the light we observe from the region around a black hole is in the form of x-rays. Occasionally these x-rays will briefly flare up.
Five by Five
Many supermassive black holes are surrounded by gas and dust, and so aren’t easily observed. But new observations from NuSTAR has peered through the dust in five galaxies.
Little Bang
In the center of our galaxy there is a supermassive black hole known as Sgr A*. Through observations of stars orbiting the black hole, we know it has a mass of about 4 million Suns. Normally this black hole is pretty quiet, but in 2013 there was an unexpected x-ray burst.
Light It Up
The image shows two colliding galaxies known as NGC 2207 and IC 2163. It’s a false-color image, where infrared is shown as dark red, visible is shown as normal, and x-ray is shown as purple. The first impression you might have is that the image looks awfully purple, and that means there are lots of x-ray sources in these two galaxies.
On X-rays and Axions
There’s been a few articles in the popular press recently announcing the discovery of dark matter particles coming from the Sun. This is not the case. No science team is claiming they’ve discovered dark matter. The story traces it origin to a paper being published in MNRAS, which could be an indirect detection of dark matter, but could also be a few other things. It is an interesting paper, nonetheless.
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 …
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