Supermassive Black Hole

February 8, 2009 – 2:02 pm

Perusing some photo’s over at NASA’s site, ran across this relatively new one from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and others

Supermassive black hole

Click it for bigger size, or head to NASA for really big.

This image of Centaurus A shows a spectacular new view of a supermassive black hole’s power. Jets and lobes powered by the central black hole in this nearby galaxy are shown by submillimeter data (colored orange) from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile and X-ray data (colored blue) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Visible light data from the Wide Field Imager on the Max-Planck/ESO 2.2 m telescope, also located in Chile, shows the dust lane in the galaxy and background stars. The x-ray jet in the upper left extends for about 13,000 light years away from the black hole. The APEX data shows that material in the jet is traveling at about half the speed of light.

Cool.

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This entry was written by William Teach and posted on at 2:02 pm and filed under Like, Gnarly, Dude, Science, Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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5 Responses to “Supermassive Black Hole”

  1. Bigfoot says:
    February 8, 2009 at 3:22 pm

    Could this explain where so much of that TARP money went to?

  2. Duncan says:
    February 8, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    Dammit BF, you beat me to it. I thought the same thing when I saw the post title…

  3. Reasic says:
    February 8, 2009 at 9:27 pm

    Cool.

    Wow, Teach. I think you and I might actually agree on something. :P

  4. Silke says:
    February 9, 2009 at 8:25 am

    Awesome!

    I’m a big fan of astronomy. Did you know this is the International Year of Astronomy? If you’re into Podcasts I recommend “365 Days of Astronomy.”

  5. William Teach says:
    February 9, 2009 at 8:56 am

    It may represent where the money for the current stimulus, er, spending bill will go :)

    We can agree on things now an then, Reasic. Maybe. Possibly. :)

    Haven’t heard of that one, Silke, but I’ll check it out. I am signed up to receive emails and such from Astronomy.

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