Telescopes

A heavily obscured primordial supermassive black hole discovered

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of a supermassive black hole in an initial phase of growth in which it’s heavily obscured and that dates back to around 850 million after the Big Bang, the oldest of that type discovered so far. A team of researchers used data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to carry out this study but even putting together other data collected with the ALMA radio telescope it’s not certain whether that black hole matches the quasar cataloged as PSO167-13 or a nearby galaxy.

The galaxy Holmberg 15A (Image courtesy Juan P. Madrid & Carlos J. Donzelli)

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An article submitted for publication in “The Astrophysical Journal” reports the discovery of an ultramassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Holmberg 15A, a supergiant elliptical galaxy that is the dominant central member of the Abell 85 galaxy cluster. A team of astronomers led by Kianusch Mehrgan of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching bei München, Germany, used the MUSE instrument mounted on ESO’s VLT in Chile to study that galaxy estimating that the mass of that black hole is about 40 billion times the Sun’s.

Representation of the jet of a gamma-ray burst such as GRB 190114C (Image courtesy Kitty Yeung)

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An article published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters” reports a study on a gamma-ray burst cataloged as GRB 190114C and detected by NASA’s Swift satellite and the MAGIC telescopes at the Canaries. Professor Evgeny Derishev and Professor Tsvi Piran put together the data from these detecions, which are about photons at very different energies, concluding that the radiations detected must have originated in a jet that moved at a speed of about 99.99% of the speed of light. These are so-called ultra-high energy emissions in the Teraelettronvolt (TeV) range and they think that the mechanism of origin is the inverse Compton scattering while emissions of less energetic photons originate from synchrotron radiation.

The Gl 357 system (Image NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith)

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An article published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics” reports the discovery of three exoplanets in the system of the red dwarf GJ 357. A team of researchers led by Rafael Luque of the Canary Islands Astrophysics Institute identified the innermost exoplanet, named GJ 357 b, thanks to the observations conducted by NASA’s TESS space telescope while the other two, named GJ 357 c and GJ 357 d, were discovered using the radial velocity method thanks to data collected over twenty years of observations of various ground-based telescopes. The three exoplanets could all be rocky and the outermost is within ​​its star system’s habitable zone.

A representation of the main characteristics of the TOI 270 system's exoplanets (Image NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Scott Wiessinger)

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An article published in the journal “Nature Astronomy” reports the discovery of three exoplanets in the system of the red dwarf indicated in the research as TOI (Tess Object of Interest) 270 because it was studied using NASA’s TESS space telescope. They’re a super-Earth and two mini-Neptunes, all with orbits very close to their star. A team of researchers used observations made by TESS and follow-up observations with other telescopes to confirm the existence of the three exoplanets and provide some estimates of their characteristics, useful also because the two mini-Neptunes could provide information to understand the mechanisms of formation of planets of that type but also of rocky ones.