black holes

An international team of astronomers has discovered a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting each other, an event that has been possible thanks to a particular strategy of working together with the XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope.

NASA's Wide Field Infrared Explorer, the WISE telescope, has made it possible to locate what appears to be the cosmic seed from which a black hole will later sprout, that finite portion of space within which there is such a high concentration of mass that none material particle, not even light, can escape from it.

'In theory they should exist in the universe, but no one had been able to find one. However, now a team of Spanish researchers has located the first binary system formed by a black hole and a 'spinning top' star, as has just been published in the scientific journal Nature.

A collision of black holes, white dwarfs or neutron stars could have been responsible for an energetic Gamma Ray Burst that hit the Earth in the Middle Ages, according to a study carried out by German astronomers, from the Institute of Astrophysics of the University from Jena and published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) space telescope was successfully launched into space on Wednesday. Thus began his mission to unveil the secrets of black holes and other exotic objects in the universe.

ESA astronomers have detected for the first time the presence of magnetic fields very close to a black hole that some particles take advantage of to escape from the dark gravitational well. The finding has been possible thanks to the observations of the Integral satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA).

On December 10, 1999, an Ariane 5 rocket took off from Kourou, French Guinea, carrying the 10-meter long XMM-Newton satellite. After several days of maneuvering, it reached its destination, an orbit one third of the way that separates us from the Moon.