NGC 1275

“Most Distant Supermassive Black Hole Discovered”

 An international group of astronomers have discovered and measured the most distant supermassive black hole to date.  This newly-discovered black holes sit in the centre of an ultrabirght quasar that was emitted just 690 million years after the Big Bang. The remarkable thing is that this light has taken almost 13 billion years to reach us - almost the same age as the Universe.  The discovery, which was made possible through data collected by the DECam Legaxy Survey (DECaLS) at the CTIO Blanco telescope, has shown that the black hole has a mass of approximately 800 million solar masses - humongous for today’s standards. This has lead to some astronomers theorizing that the very early Universe might have had ripe conditions allowing the creation of very large black holes, such as those with masses reaching 100,000 times the mass of the Sun.  “Gathering all this mass in fewer than 690 million years is an enormous challenge for theories of supermassive black hole growth,” said team leader Dr. Eduardo Bañados, from Carnegie Observatories.

Read more about this fascinating story at: http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/most-distant-supermassive-black-hole-05509.html

Image: Artist’s conception of the most-distance supermassive black hole every discovered via Robin Dienel / Carnegie Institution for Science

The end of time looks promising: by Sara Shakeel

Merging Galaxies Bursting With Light - NGC 2207 and IC 2163

Just like our Milky Way galaxy, NGC 2207 and IC 2163 are sprinkled with many star systems known as X-ray binaries, which consist of a star in a tight orbit around either a neutron star or a stellar-mass black hole. The strong gravity of the neutron star or black hole pulls matter from the companion star. As this matter falls toward the neutron star or black hole, it is heated to millions of degrees and generates X-rays. These special objects are in a category of objects known as ultra-luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) and have been found using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Space Observatory. This Image is a mix of the optical and X-ray wavelength, with the optical showing the galaxies structure and the bursts of pink and purple representing concentrations of X-rays.

Credit: NASA/Chandra/Cal Tech/Harvard

Rosette Nebula HaRGB by Neil’s Astro on Flickr.

This is Kjell Lindgren. He’s a NASA astronaut who just got back from 5 months on the International Space Station. There are two reasons why this picture is hilarious:

His wife is flawless and makes bad space puns to make him do household chores.

I have that shirt. Thousands of people have that shirt. That shirt is available at Target. Which means actual astronaut Kjell Lindgren, with his wardrobe already full of NASA-issued and logo-emblazoned clothes, was at Target, saw a NASA shirt, and was like, “Yes, I am buying this because this is what I want to spend my actual astronaut salary on.”

 tl;dr NASA employs a bunch of fucking nerds