... Our Sun is part of a huge wheel-shaped collection of stars. ... Astronomers have long suspected it was a very massive black hole, and that every galaxy had such a central mass, created early in the history of the universe. ... However, unless that object happens to be headed directly at the black hole (a relatively small target) it will just swing around and fly away again, like a comet making a pass at the Sun. The velocity acquired in falling towards the black hole also helps it escape. ...

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... ESO is building what will be the World's largest optical telescope array, The Very Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT Project organisation is responsible for the design and construction of the Unit Telescopes, including enclosures, optics, adapter-rotators and coating unit. ... Unit Telescopes Overview - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Secondary mirror (M2 Unit) - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ... Coating Unit - This page is outdated, an update is in process. ...

Astronotes Armagh Planetarium's Stellar Blog! ... Stars . ... Starbursts are short-lived events, stars are forming so quickly that the reservoirs of interstellar gas from which stars are coalescing would be used up on a timescale much shorter than the age of the galaxy . ... Strong stellar winds from giant new stars in the starburst region combine with the blasts of supernovae to push a mighty flood of extremely hot gas, a ?superwind? from the galaxy thousands of light years into intergalactic space. ...

... Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2010 December 7 . Too Close to a Black Hole . ... Explanation: What would you see if you went right up to a black hole? ... The black hole has such strong gravity that light is noticeably bent towards it - causing some very unusual visual distortions . ... About APOD | ... NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply . ...

... Too Close to a Black Hole . ... Credit Copyright: Alain Riazuelo Explanation: What would you see if you went right up to a black hole? ... The black hole has such strong gravity that light is noticeably bent towards it - causing some very unusual visual distortions . ... Near the black hole , you can see the whole sky - light from every direction is bent around and comes back to you. ... Publications with keywords: black hole - gravitational lens . ... Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689 Deflects Light . ...

... We have measured this "redshift" for the pink black holes, and allowed for it in our calculations. ... We see this effect in the emission from gas around these pink black holes, but it is far too small an effect to account for the pinkness. Thus the swirling motions of gas around or into the black holes cannot produc the colour. ... At first we thought that these things were normal blue black holes hidden behind clouds of interstellar dust, that absorbed the blue light and made them appear pink. ...

... Proposal Type: General Category: Observation Category: Time Requested this semester: Hours already used for this pro ject: Additional Hours required to complete pro ject: Minimum Useful Time: Expected Data Storage: Prop osal Title: ABSTRACT: Regular Pulsars Galactic 55.5 0 1.5 h over 500 GB Searching for Millisecond Pulsars in Low-Latitude Fermi Unidentified Sources We propose to search for pulsars in fourteen Fermi unidentified sources close to the Galactic plane (|b|<4 degrees). ...

... HUBBLE DISCOVERS BLACK HOLES IN UNEXPECTED PLACES . ... Even more odd, these new black holes were found in the cores of glittering, "beehive" swarms of stars -- called globular star clusters -- that orbit our Milky Way and other galaxies. ... Supermassive black holes found by Hubble in the centers of galaxies represent about 0.5 percent of the galaxies' mass. Amazingly, the black holes now found in star clusters, which are 10,000 times less massive than a galaxy, also obey this trend. ...

... General information . ... Staff . Research staff . ... Information . ... Historical highlights . Historical research . ... This process is thought to occur in circumstellar disks of gas and dust around young stars on rather short timescales : infrared surveys show that the number of low mass stars with disks drops dramatically for stars older than 10 Myr, suggesting that in order to form large solids before the disk disperses, the growth process has to take place within a few million years. ...

... Comet Ikeya-Zhang, designated C/2002 C1 (Ikeya-Zhang), is named after Kaoru Ikeya of Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, and Daqing Zhang of Henan province, China, who independently discovered it on the night of 1 February 2002. A preliminary orbit reported the following day indicated that it would come moderately close to both the Earth and the Sun and that it might become visible to the naked eye during late March and April 2002. ... Bailey, M.E., Clube, S.V.M. and Napier, W.M. The Origin of Comets . ...

... SS433 is a close binary system, one star is a supergiant, a second one is a black hole. ... Even a black hole cannot accept such an enormous mass flux, a supercritical accretion disk appears, all the excess gas glows up to several tens of thousands degrees and is ejected off the disk with enormous velocities. ... SAO researchers have found an evidence of the supercritical accretion onto a black hole in SS433, which follows from a brightness variability of the SS433 disk. ...