The groundbreaking news this week of the existence of gravitational waves—long just a theory by Albert Einstein—may have Earthling stargazers scratching their heads at the concept of how the mysterious phenomenon known as black holes affects our universe. It may be tough to get your brain around, and even NASA’s rocket scientists have struggled to illustrate their raw universe-bending power. Here, a look at what they and other space-watchers have seen and theorized is going on out there in our galaxy and beyond.
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An artist’s impression of a growing supermassive black hole is seen in this NASA handout illustration from June 2011. Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.
Chandra X-Ray Observatory/A.Hobart/NASA/Reuters
An undated Hubble image shows NGC 1566, a galaxy located about 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Dorado (The Dolphinfish). According to NASA, the NGC 1566 is an intermediate spiral galaxy and its small but extremely bright nucleus is clearly visible in this image. The centers of such galaxies are very active and luminous, emitting strong bursts of radiation and potentially harboring supermassive black holes that are many millions of times the mass of our sun.
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Markarian 231, a binary black hole found in the center of the nearest quasar host galaxy to Earth, is seen in a NASA illustration released in August 2015. Like a pair of whirling skaters, the black-hole duo generates tremendous amounts of energy that makes the core of the host galaxy outshine the glow of the galaxy's population of billions of stars. Hubble observations of the ultraviolet light emitted from the nucleus of the galaxy were used to deduce the geometry of the disk, and NASA astronomers were surprised to see light diminishing close to the central black hole.
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A composite image of a galaxy illustrating how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power is shown in this NASA photo from 2013. The image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, and radio waves from the Very Large Array in New Mexico. This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy some 850 million light-years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our sun.
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An artist's concept illustrates what the flaring black hole called GX 339-4 might look like in this NASA handout image. Infrared observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer reveal the best information yet on the chaotic and extreme environments of this black hole's jets. GX 339-4 likely formed from a star that exploded. It is surrounded by an accretion disk (red) of material being pulled onto the black hole from a neighboring star (yellow orb). Some of this material is shot away in the form of jets (yellow flows above and below the disk). The region close in to the black hole glows brightly in infrared light.
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A NASA image shows giant plumes of radiation seen in X-rays from Chandra (purple) and radio data from the Very Large Array (orange) from radio galaxy 3C353, a wide, double-lobed active galaxy that is very luminous at radio wavelengths, where the galaxy is the tiny point in the center in this image released in November 2013. Jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can transport huge amounts of energy across great distances.
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This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows the bright star-forming ring that surrounds the heart of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097, a Seyfert galaxy. The larger-scale structure of the galaxy is barely visible. Its comparatively dim spiral arms, which surround its heart in a loose embrace, reach out beyond the edges of this frame. This face-on galaxy, lying 45 million light-years away from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax (The Furnace), is particularly attractive for astronomers. Lurking at the very center of the galaxy, a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our sun is gradually sucking in the matter around it. The area immediately around the black hole shines powerfully with radiation coming from the material falling in. The distinctive ring around the black hole is bursting with new star formation due to an inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy. These star-forming regions are glowing brightly thanks to emission from clouds of ionized hydrogen. The ring is around 5,000 light-years across, although the spiral arms of the galaxy extend tens of thousands of light-years beyond it.
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This illustration shows an artist’s impression of a black hole engine. Black holes are the most fuel-efficient engines in the universe: If a car could use this kind of engine, it could theoretically go about a billion miles on a gallon of gas, according to researcher Steve Allen of Stanford University. Fueled by matter lured by the holes’ vast gravity, most of the energy released near the black hole’s point of no return—known as the event horizon—shows up in the form of high-energy jets, which spew forth from magnetized disks of gas.
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A NASA composite image, featuring both X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory and radio emissions from the Very Large Array released in November 2013, shows new evidence that has been uncovered of the presence of a jet of high-energy particles blasting out of the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole. Astronomers have been looking for a jet from Sgr A* for years, since it is now common to find jets tied to a range of cosmic objects on both big and small scales. Prior to this latest study, there have been reports of possible evidence of a jet associated with Sgr A*.
NASA / Reuters
The barred spiral galaxy NGC 4639 is seen in an undated image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, released Oct. 16, 2015. NGC 4639 lies over 70 million light-years away in the constellation of Virgo and is one of about 1,500 galaxies that make up the Virgo Cluster. NGC 4639 also conceals a massive black hole that is consuming the surrounding gas, according to a NASA news release.
NASA / Reuters
