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X-Ray Spex
Credit: NASA Marshall Center
Black holes are some of the universe's most enigmatic and mysterious objects. Take a tour of some of the most famous ones in the cosmos. This image of the Cygnus X-1 binary star system is one of the first two focused high-energy X-ray images of any astron
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I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles
Credit: Gallo et al., Westerbork radio telescope
The cross marks the location of the black hole Cygnus X-1 in this radio image. The bright region to the left (east) of the black hole is a dense cloud of gas existing in the space between the stars, the interstellar medium. The action of the jet from Cygn
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Here Comes the Warm Jets
Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Combining observations done with ESO's Very Large Telescope and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. The black hole blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years
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Radio Waves
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
This artist's concept shows a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core. The black hole is shooting out jets of radio waves. New research led by theoretical astrophysicist David Garofalo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., sug
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Eat to the Beat
Credit: Felipe Esquivel Reed
Artist's schematic impression of the distortion of space-time by a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. The black hole will swallow dark matter at a rate which depends on its mass and on the amount of dark matter around it.
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Portrait of the Quasar as a Young Black Hole
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Illustration of a young black hole, such as the two distant dust-free quasars spotted recently by the Spitzer Space Telescope.
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Beware of the Blob
Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss
This illustration shows what one of the galaxies inside a blob might look like, with the spiral arms of the galaxy in yellow and white, and two-sided outflow powered by the supermassive black hole buried inside shown in bright yellow.
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Our Strange Universe
Credit: SRON
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Evidence
Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/Durham Univ./D.Alexander et al.); Optical (NASA/ESA/STScI/IoA/S.Chapman et al.); Lyman-alpha Optical (NAOJ/Subaru/Tohoku Univ./T.Hayashino et al.); Infrared (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Durham Univ./J.Geach et al.)
On left, a blob of glowing hydrogen gas appears yellow. On right, the blue light is evidence for a growing supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy. The hydrogen gas appears yellow.
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Stuck in the Middle with a Black Hole
Credit: NASA/CXC/UFRGS/R. Nemmen et al.
The image shows 1 out of the 9 large galaxies included in the Chandra study, containing a supermassive black hole in its center.
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Smash It Up
Credit: NASA/ESA/STScI
A massive black hole hidden at the center of nearby galaxy, Centaurus A, feeds on a smaller galaxy in a spectacular collision.
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Eject, Eject!
Credit: NASA/Hubble
In a Hubble picture, a red circle indicates an object in a distant galaxy that could be an ejected black hole.
