Astronomers observed the most luminous quasar in the universe, with a luminosity that exceeds 350 trillion times the luminosity of our Sun. The quasar lies at a distance that light needs 12.5 billion years to travel to us. Further study of the object revealed an extremely turbulent behaviour that may explain its extreme luminosity.

On Friday, January 22, NASA invites media for live interviews with scientists and engineers working on James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) the successor to Hubble space Telescope (HST). The audience will have the opportunity to discuss the technology used in building the largest and most powerful space telescope.

XMM is an X-ray space telescope with an unprecedented effective area. The largest XMM project is the XMM-XXL. XXL’s goal is to study the clusters of galaxies that are governed by the dark matter and dark energy and therefore reveal the mysteries of the dark side of the Universe. The XXL team consists of over 100 astronomers from around the world and recently released 13 papers, presenting their first results.

On 28th September, India launched their first satellite dedicated to astronomy, ASTROSAT. The satellite will study astrophysical phenomena over a wide range of the ElectroMagnetic spectrum. From visible and ultraviolet (UV) to X-rays and Gamma-rays. The aim of the observatory is to study star-birth regions and high-energy processes, such as binary star systems of neutron stars and black holes, as well as γ-ray bursts (video).

High Energy Astrophysics, i.e. X-ray and gamma-ray astronomy, is a very active domain in Europe with 26 institutes/universities involved. AHEAD is a project (Activities for the High Energy Astrophysics Domain) which objective is to integrate national efforts in this research area to keep the community at the cutting edge of science and technology.

Astronomers have detected X-rays from Uranus for the first time, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. This result may help scientists learn more about this enigmatic ice giant planet in our Solar System. Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun Read More …

A new project using sonification turns astronomical images from Chandra and other telescopes into sound. As the cursor moves across the images, sounds represent the position and brightness of the sources in which each telescope plays a different instrument. Previously, Read More …

Gravitational waves are invisible (yet incredibly fast) ripples in the otherwise tough, stiff fabric of spacetime. Gravitational waves travel at the speed of light and squeeze and stretch anything in their path as they pass by. Gravitational waves are fundamentally Read More …

Astronomers may have found the most distant supermassive black hole with a jet detected in X-rays using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The source of this jet is a quasar — a rapidly growing supermassive black hole — named PSO J352.4034-15.3373 Read More …

In the first all-sky survey by the eROSITA X-ray telescope onboard SRG, astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have detected the largest in terms of apparent size supernova remnant ever observed in X-rays. The supernova remnant (SNR) Read More …