M.I.N.I.O.N.

(via APOD: 2012 November 2 - The Black Hole in the Milky Way)

The Black Hole in the Milky Way 
Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, NuSTAR project

The supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy is, thankfully, not quite as active as that found in an active galactic nucleus (the name for the black holes at the center of active galaxies like Centaurus A, or  Seyfert galaxies, active galaxies with visibly bright centers, a subclass of active galaxies), but it does have its bursts. This is a collection of observations from the new NuSTAR space telescope, which can observe higher energy x-rays than Chandra (NASA CXC) or XMM-Newton (ESA XMM).

“Spanning two days of NuSTAR observations, the flare sequence is illustrated in the panels at the far right. X-rays are generated in material heated to over 100 million degrees Celsius, accelerated to nearly the speed of light as it falls into the Miky Way’s central black hole. The main inset X-ray image spans about 100 light-years. In it, the bright white region represents the hottest material closest to the black hole, while the pinkish cloud likely belongs to a nearby supernova remnant.”

(via APOD: 2012 October 6 - At the Heart of Orion)

At the Heart of Orion 
Credit: Image Data - Hubble Legacy Archive, Processing - Robert Gendler

I’ve come to love the fact that we’ll never quite get done parsing all of the Hubble data. We’ll always encounter people who are processing it in a slightly different way the provides new and interesting visuals.

This is the Trapezium cluster of stars in the heart of the Orion Nebula. They are very young (3 million years old), very hot, and very massive. Most of the visual glow you see in this image (you’ll note that the reflection aspect of the nebula is yellow, not the usual blue, because there is just so much light and radiation) comes from just those four stars. Now there’s a harsh ultraviolet environment for you.

Additionally, it would seem that the prior conditions of the nebula, smaller and more compact, created some runaway stellar collisions (massive stars being born very close to each other, falling into gravitational entanglement, keep merging and gravitationally attracting more of their massive neighbors) have created a hundred-solar-mass black hole. The Trapezium stars move quite fast, so this would explain their motion.

It would also put a black hole about 1500 light-years from us, the closest one known.

(via APOD: 2012 May 3 - M106 Close Up)

Jaw. Drop.

Patiently combine Hubble ACS data with tons of ground-based color information (note the string of credit acronyms below), and you too can get this amazing portrait of a nearby Seyfert class active galaxy.

M106/NGC 4258 has a massive central black hole that creates emissions across the spectrum from radio up through x-rays. The superheated gasses that fall in toward the black hole emit all of that energy, which shows up visually as the bright central core. Further out in the spiral arms and dust lanes, the image composite picks out the young blue stars and the pinkish stellar nurseries.

Credit: Composite Image Data - Hubble Legacy Archive; Adrian Zsilavec, Michelle Qualls, Adam Block / NOAO / AURA / NSF 
Processing - André van der Hoeven

(via APOD: 2011 December 30 - The Diner at the Center of the Galaxy)

If you thought Lovejoy’s brush with the Sun was nearly cataclysmic, imagine being a dust cloud whose orbit takes you a little too close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy.

In this artist’s rendition, the red and yellow are used for the dust cloud. The red trajectory is the path we know the center of mass will take based on observations from the Very Large Telescope.

The blue orbits are from central stars near the galactic center.

The nebula contains several times the mass of the Earth in gas and dust. However, the heavyweight black hole is about 4 million times the mass of the Sun.

Illustration Credit: ESO/MPE/Marc Schartmann

(via http://www.cv.nrao.edu/course/astr534/Introradastro.html)

This introduction to radio astronomy also includes a spooky image of the galactic nucleus imaged by the VLA and chosen by Phil for his Halloween gallery.

I’m just going to quote Phil, who always manages to combine science and amusing writing:

THE MOURNING WOMAN AT THE MILKY WAY’S HEART

At the center of our Milky Way galaxy lurks a massive black hole, which, for the moment, is quiet. The surrounding material barely glows in radio waves, but there, off to the right… is that the baleful face of a woman, just a half a light year from the monster? Why is she sad? What is she mourning? 

Perhaps she perceives her own fate: being twisted around, the gas making up her visage warped and wrapped as it circles that black hole over thousands of years, eventually, it may be, to take the final plunge into eterity.

(via APOD: 2011 August 28 - A Jet from Galaxy M87)

M87 shoots a jet of electrons out into space. From the APOD editor:

“The most popular hypothesis holds that the jet is created by energetic gas swirling around a massive black hole at the galaxy’s center. The result is a 5000 light-year long blowtorch where electrons are ejected outward at near light-speed, emitting eerily blue light during a magnetic spiral. M87 is a giant elliptical galaxy residing only 50 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The faint dots of light surrounding M87’s center are large ancient globular clusters of stars.”

So cool.

(via Black hole caught in act of swallowing a star - Technology & science - Space - Space.com - msnbc.com) - HT @astronomy for the link

Swift J1644+57, a super-massive black hole, started to pull in a star that got too close. The Swift observatory noticed the gamma ray bursts and a bunch of x-ray and radio images were all taken of the area to get a better picture of the event. This is actually the first time we’ve been able to see the start of one of these. Usually, we only see the aftermath.

Here’s a composite image of the black hole itself:

Images from Swift’s Ultraviolet/Optical (white, purple) and X-Ray telescopes (yellow and red) were combined to make this view of Swift J1644+57.

And NASA has made an animation of the event:

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/a010800/a010807/index.html

The NASA write-up, with links to more visuals, is here:

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/swift/bursts/devoured-star.html

(via The Fate of the First Black Hole - ScienceNOW)

Cygnus X-1 is a star/black hole pair that is likely to die in a completely non-spectacular way…sorta. OK, it’s like this: the black hole will keep pulling mass away from the star, which will shift the orbit of the two objects (because their masses will shift and the gravitational pull between them will shift, the orbit will change) so that they get further and further away from each other (as angular momentum - “outward” - begins to have more influence than acceleration due to gravity - “inward”). This means that when the star finally blows up, they’ll be too far apart to collapse into each other, and instead form a neutron star/black hole pair. (This will be around 2.6 million years from now, short on the astrophysical timescale, long on ours.)

Unfortunately, for any future astrophysicists, this means that the event will not allow anyone to try to detect gravitational waves, as they might have done if the star were going to collapse/explode right into the black hole.