AHEAD

A neutron star merger puzzles astronomers since it continues to brighten, months after it was first observed!!

Astronomers re-analysed X-ray data from the Perseus galaxy cluster and their findings may shed light on the nature of the mysterious, invisible dark matter that makes up about 85% of the matter in our Universe.

Astronomers observed the most distant Supermassive Black Hole (SMBH) ever detected! The SMBH weighs about 800 million times the mass of the Sun and is located more than 13 billion light years from Earth, i.e., it was formed only 690 million years after the Big Bang!

Astronomers used X-ray and optical observations to find out that a previously detected source is actually much more interesting than what was initially thought!!

When a star passes close to a black hole (BH), the enormous gravitational force of the BH pulls the stellar material. This phenomenon is called “stelar tidal disruption”. During this process an immense amount of energy is released and the surroundings of the BH are brightened in an event called a flare. These flares contain high-energy radiation, including ultraviolet and X-ray light, that destroys any dust up to a radius around the black hole. It is like the BH uses these flares to clean its room!

Using a machine learning technique, astronomers from the National Observatory of Athens, estimated distances for about 90,000 X-ray galaxies!

Galaxy clusters are the largest structures in the universe. The X-COP project tries to access the physical information on the thermodynamical properties of the hot plasma inside these structures.

Super Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) are formed by galaxy collisions and usually reside at the centre of the galaxies. Most, if not all galaxies, host a SMBH. Single SMBHs have been detected all over the universe, but dual SMBHs have been difficult to find. Now astronomers used a novel method to identify five pairs!

Astronomers detected an AGN, located 800 million light years away from Earth that presents evidence of turning off and on again.

Very massive stars during their lifetime may lose more than half their initial mass through winds. What is left is a hot core known as Wolf-Rayet (WR) star. The discarded outer layers that surround the star are called Wolf-Rayet nebula. Theoretical models predict that these WR nebulae should emit X-rays. Nevertheless, this X-ray emission has proved elusive. Now astrophysicists, using the XMM-Newton satellite, detected for the first time this X-ray emission from a Wolf-Rayet (WR) nebula.