The baby black holes are not behaving as they should.
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Radio images of the sky have revealed hundreds of “baby” and supermassive black holes in distant galaxies, with the galaxies’ light bouncing around in unexpected ways.
Galaxies are vast cosmic bodies, tens of thousands of light years in size, made up of gas, dust, and stars (like our Sun).
A rendering of a rapidly spinning pulsar in a binary system. A companion star is distorted by the pulsar’s enormous gravity and slowly but surely evaporating. Image: Knispel/Clark/Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics/NASA GSFC
Using the computing power of the citizen-science project Einstein@Home to analyse data from NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope, researchers have identified a rapidly spinning pulsar, a so-called “black widow,” that is slowly but surely evaporating a companion star
A paper in
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society describes the analysis, showing the spinning neutron star, otherwise known as a pulsar, is spinning at 377 times per second. The findings were made possible by the Einstein@Home project, a volunteer network of thousands of home computers that, when idle, sifted through years of Fermi data.
Scintillating discovery: these distant baby black holes seem to be misbehaving — and experts are perplexed australasianscience.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from australasianscience.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Secrets of 3000 galaxies laid bare The seven-year SAMI Survey has allowed scientists to understand the complex interaction between thousands of galaxies. Their findings will help astronomers understand how the universe has evolved and how it might develop further. Working the SAMI Survey at the Anglo Australian Telescope.
The complex mechanics determining how galaxies spin, grow, cluster and die have been revealed following the release of all the data gathered during a massive seven-year astronomy research project led by scientists at the University of Sydney.
The astronomers observed 13 galaxies at a time, building to a total of 3068, using a custom-built instrument called the Sydney-AAO Multi-Object Integral-Field Spectrograph (SAMI), connected to the 4-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) at Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales. The telescope is operated by the Australian National University.
In 1967, Jocelyn Bell, then a graduate student in astronomy at Cambridge University, noticed a strange signal, a series of sharp pulses that came every 1.3 seconds, in the data of her radio telescope that seemed too fast to be coming from anything like a star. Bell and her advisor Anthony Hewish initially thought they might have detected a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization that they named LGM-1, for “Little Green Men.” (It was later renamed.) It turned out not be aliens, but rather the discovery of the first pulsar. ‘Spider’ Pulsar System
Now, more than 50 years later, an international research team searching for so-called ‘Spider’ pulsar systems – rapidly spinning neutron stars whose high-energy outflows are destroying their binary companion star, is at the core of a celestial object a gamma ray pulsar now known as PSR J2039?5617. The researchers utilized the the enormous computing power of the citizen science project Einstein@Home to track down the n