WhyCosmo

  Like two cosmic sumo wrestlers, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected the closest-ever pair of supermassive black holes . Located in the galaxy MCG-03-34-64 , these two giants are just 300 light-years apart and are about to embark on a galactic dance that will eventually end in a massive collision . As they devour gas and dust from their surroundings, they glow brightly as active galactic nuclei (AGN) , giving us a rare peek into the process of galaxy mergers . This is an artist's depiction of a pair of active black holes at the heart of two merging galaxies. They are both surrounded by an accretion disk of hot gas. Some of the material is ejected along the spin axis of each black hole. Confined by powerful magnetic fields, the jets blaze across space at nearly the speed of light as devastating beams of energy. NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) This discovery is even more exciting because such close black hole pairs are scarce in our local un...

 The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has once again dazzled the world with its latest image, capturing the stunning transformation of a nebula by infant stars. This captivating image presents RCW 7, a nebula located just over 5,300 light-years away in the constellation Puppis. This striking NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image features the nebula RCW 7. ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Tan (Chalmers University & University of Virginia), R. Fedriani Nebulae, rich with the raw materials needed for star formation, are where the magic begins. Under gravity’s influence, parts of these molecular clouds collapse and coalesce into very young stars, known as protostars. These protostars, still enveloped in spinning discs of leftover gas and dust, are massive and emit strongly ionizing radiation and stellar winds. This powerful radiation transforms the nebula into an H II region, filled with hydrogen ions that emit a soft pinkish glow. The image, taken with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 i...