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Black Holes
ISRO is set to welcome the new year with the launch of its first X-Ray Polarimeter Satellite that would offer insights into celestial objects like black holes, onboard a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle rocket on Monday. The launch comes after the success of its Gaganyaan Test Vehicle D1 mission in October. The PSLV-C58 rocket, in its 60th mission, would carry primary payload XPoSat and 10 other satellites to be deployed in low earth orbits. The 25-hour countdown commenced on Sunday for the lift-off scheduled at 9.10 am from the first launch pad at this spaceport, located about 135 kms east of Chennai on January 1. The countdown commenced for PSLV-C58 at 8.10 am today, ISRO sources said. The X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (XPoSat) is aimed to investigate the polarisation of intense X-ray sources in space. According to ISRO, it is the first dedicated scientific satellite from ISRO to carry out research in space-based polarisation measurements of X-ray emission from celestial ...
Astronomers have discovered a rapidly growing black hole in one of the most extreme galaxies known in the very early Universe, according to a new study. The discovery of the galaxy and the black hole at its centre provided new clues on the formation of the very first supermassive black holes, the researchers from the University of Texas, US, and the University of Arizona, US, said. Using observations taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a radio observatory sited in Chile, the team have determined that the galaxy, named COS-87259, containing this new supermassive black hole is very extreme, forming stars at a rate 1000 times that of our own Milky Way and containing over a billion solar masses worth of interstellar dust, the study said. The galaxy shines bright from both this intense burst of star formation and the growing supermassive black hole at its centre, the study said. The new work is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical ...
Astronomers have discovered the closest known black hole to Earth, just 1,600 light-years away. Scientists reported Friday that this black hole is 10 times more massive than our sun. And it's three times closer than the previous record-holder. It was identified by observing the motion of its companion star, which orbits the black hole at about the same distance as Earth orbits the sun. The black hole was initially identified using the European Space Agency's Gaia spacecraft, said Kareem El-Badry of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. El-Badry and his team followed up with the International Gemini Observatory in Hawaii to confirm their findings, which were published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers are uncertain how the system formed in the Milky Way. Named Gaia BH1, it's located in the constellation Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics with one half to Roger Penrose and the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez