PHILIP F. HOPKINSHarvard-Smithsonian Center for AstrophysicsRAMESH NARAYANLARS HERNQUISTAstrophysical JournalP. F. Hopkins, R. Narayan, and L. Hernquist. How Much Mass Do Supermassive Black Holes Eat in Their Old Age? ApJ, 643:641-651, June 2006.
which unlike the bright supernovae we cannot observe. However, it is unclear how much mass these stars lose during black hole formation, or how large their natal kicks are. If the massive star directly collapses into a black hole, no ...
Much studied but not fully understood, black holes are among the most mysterious cosmic objects in our universe. Do you know how big a supermassive black hole is? It's so big… that the fastest moving thing in our universe, light traveling at 670 million mph, would take weeks to cross...
“This is the earliest evidence of how a supermassive black hole is affecting its host galaxy around it,” said the paper’s lead author Feige Wang, a Hubble Fellow at UArizona’s Steward Observatory. “From observations of less distant galaxies, we know that this has to happen, but we...
It was visibly(明显地)in orbit, which was more proof of a black We did some math that told us that stars should take 10 to 16 years to orbit if the center was a black And that's what happened. Over the years, our technology has improved, so we've been able to see much.What ...
For example, in the core of galaxy NGC 4261, there is a brown, spiral-shaped disk that is rotating. The disk is about the size of our solar system, but its mass is much greater than the mass of the sun. Such a huge mass for a disk might indicate that a black hole is present wi...
is there, gravitationally speaking. Plus, the strength of gravity falls off incredibly quickly the farther you get from the black hole. So, only stars that are close to the black hole orbit it; the vast majority of stars in a galaxy orbit the center of mass of the galaxy as a whole, ...
While subtle, this approach has offered novel insight into the microscopic entropy of near-BPS and near-extremal black holes, in doing so shedding new light on the long-standing black hole mass gap problem. In particular, one learns that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy formula generically receives...
Based on the orbital characteristics of those stars, the hidden companions must have a mass around eight to nine times that of the Sun. The only kind of astrophysical object that fits that description is a black hole. But these two black holes, dubbed BH1 and BH2, pose a fun astrophysica...
If this stellar vestige is alone, a black hole will generally just sit there not doing much. But if gas and dust surround the object, that material will get sucked into the black hole's maw, creating bright bursts of light as the gas and dust heat up, swirling around like water going...