Mysterious ring of stars guards Andromeda’s heart

[emad]

Mysterious ring of stars guards Andromeda’s heart


The new observations prove conclusively that a supermassive black hole really does lurk at the heart of Andromeda, with a mass 140 million times that of our Sun (Image: R Gendler)The Milky Way's near-twin galaxy, Andromeda, harbours a supermassive black hole at its core that is surrounded by an unexpected and unexplained disc of young stars.

These new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope answer one longstanding mystery: the source of bright blue light very close to the spiral galaxy's central black hole, first spotted using Hubble a decade ago. Yet solving this mystery has immediately created another in its place.

The newly discovered disc is composed of over 400 very hot, young blue stars, orbiting like a planetary system very close to the black hole. That puzzles astronomers because the black hole's intense gravitational field should have torn apart any clouds of matter long before they could coalesce to form new stars.

The stars form a very flat disc that is only one light year across. An elliptical disc of older red stars surrounds it, spanning about five light years. Since the two discs appear to be in the same plane, they are probably related, but no one yet understands how either disc came into being. View an animation of how the two discs of stars might look, in Quicktime, or Mpeg format.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8025

[rodeodance]

1. no one knows how they came into being. Such interesting stuff.

......but no one yet understands how either disc came into being. View an animation of how the two discs of stars might look, in Quicktime, or Mpeg format.

[acmavm]

2. Thanks. I love articles like this.

.

[ochazuke]

3. Hubble. Money well spent.

And they (bush, NASA) want to abandon it and instead go back to the moon for a hundred billion dollars.

idiots!

[SteppingRazor]

4. It's nice just to have the supermassive black hole confirmation...

much less the odd ring of blue stars.

Up until this point, the idea that gigantic (from a mass, not size standpoint) black holes dwell at the center of galaxies had only been a theory that intriguingly described the behavior at the center of galaxies. Confirming this massive black hole puts the theory well on its way to confirmed, irrefutable fact -- much like, say, evolution :evilgrin:

[rman]

6. actually it already had been confirmed

there's one in the center of our own galaxy.

The Black Hole in the Galactic Center
http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/staff/hfalcke/bh/sld1.html
(slide show, cool pictures)
by Heino Falcke
ASTRON, Dinwgeloo
University of Nijmegen, Dept. of Astronomy
Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie (Bonn)

[Maple]

5. Birth

[JitterbugPerfume]

7. Wow

THIS is why I will never ever leave DU

[mainegreen]

8. sooo beautiful.

B-)

[Desertrose]

9. Cosmic birth.....pretty impressive

Breathtaking....

thanks,e mad!