Fermi’s Large Area Telescope resolved high-energy gamma rays from an extended region around the active galaxy Centaurus A. The emission corresponds to million-light-year-wide radio-emitting gas thrown out by the galaxy’s supersized black hole. NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope maps gamma rays, radiation that typically packs 100 billion times the energy of radio waves. Nevertheless, and to the surprise of many Read more »

VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy), a new telescope, has just started work at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. VISTA is a survey telescope working at infrared wavelengths and is the world’s largest telescope dedicated to mapping the sky. Its large mirror, wide field of view and very sensitive detectors will reveal Read more »

Ever heard about a Cannibal galaxy? Read on to find out more about an interesting galaxy that eats other galaxies! A new technique using near-infrared images, obtained with ESO’s 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT), allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes of the giant cannibal galaxy Centaurus A, unveiling its “last meal” in unprecedented detail — a smaller Read more »

Good news for all who are interested in black holes! Astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, find that an X-ray source in galaxy NGC 5408 that represents one of the best cases for a middleweight black hole to date. While astronomers have studied lightweight and heavyweight black holes for decades, the evidence for black holes with Read more »

Love to gaze at the milky way? Take a look at the picture below. This panoramic image was created by joining together 3000 individual photographs. On this high-resolution picture the Milky Way galaxy can be seen as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of ‘Publications Read more »

NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft, that was launched in October 2008, has made it possible for scientists to construct the first comprehensive sky map of our solar system and its location in the Milky Way galaxy. The sky map, that was produced with data that two detectors on the spacecraft collected during six months of observations,  will change the Read more »

A team of astronomers have discovered a new category of black hole. Named as HLX-1, this new black hole is neither massive nor compact and lightweight. So, it is a medium-sized or intermediate black hole. Before it’s discovery, there was no solid evidence about the existence of intermediate mass black holes
Astronomers, led by astrophysicists at the Centre dEtude Spatiale Read more »

Our Milky Way is larger, heavier and faster than astronomers thought. A new study presented at the American Astronomical Society’s convention in Long Beach, California, reveals that our planet, along with the whole solar system, is moving 100,000 miles per hour faster in our galactic orbit than we thought, and that the Milky Way Galaxy is 15 percent larger and Read more »