Chandra observatory

A burst of activity in the middle of the Milky Way
11/06/2012 - 08:41

A team of scientists from MIT, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Michigan and elsewhere have used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory to detect the brightest flare ever observed from Sagittarius A*. The flare, recorded 26,000 light years away, is 150 times brighter than the black hole’s normal luminosity. Scientists observed the flare for more than one hour before it faded away. This brief burst of activity, they say, may be a clue to how mature black holes like Sagittarius A* behave.

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NASA's Chandra Finds Fastest Wind From Stellar-Mass Black Hole
02/22/2012 - 09:20

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have clocked the fastest wind yet discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole. This result has important implications for understanding how this type of black hole behaves.

 

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NASA's Chandra Finds Milky Way's Black Hole May be Grazing on Asteroids
02/08/2012 - 14:33

A new study provides a possible explanation for the mysterious flares. The suggestion is that there is a cloud around Sgr A containing hundreds of trillions of asteroids and comets, which have been stripped from their parent stars. The panel on the left is an image containing nearly a million seconds of Chandra observing of the region around the black hole, with red representing low-energy X-rays, green as medium-energy X-rays, and blue being the highest.

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