Continuing with the video series, I interviewed Peter Edmonds, a press scientist with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
He showed pictures of several objects:

Cornet Star Cluster
The Sombrero Galaxy
Abell 520
Supernova Remnant G292
NGC 4258
Eta Carina
The Eagle Nebula
Centaurus A

Fraser, Pamela and I have been whining remarking to each other that there is a huge amount of news coming from this meeting, and we’re having a heckuva time keeping up. Some is worth a long writeup, while others can probably be handled with a short post. Below are a few of the stories that […]

Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk at the heart of most galaxies. Scientists have long believed that only the galaxies with thick central bulges could pull together enough mass for a supermassive black hole to form. But NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has turned up evidence that even skinny galaxies, with no central bulge, can […]

 
When a star like our Sun dies, it’ll end up as a white dwarf. And if a star contains 1.4 times the mass of the Sun, it’ll have enough gravity to turn into a neutron star. Much bigger stars turn into black holes. But now it turns out, neutron stars can be much more massive […]

Greedy black holes can only consume so much material. The leftover matter backs up into an accretion disk surrounding the black hole. The pull of the black hole is so strong that flashes of radiation emitted from this accretion disk might need to make several orbits around the black hole before it can actually escape […]

The supermassive black holes that lurk at the hearts of the most massive galaxies might be spinning faster than astronomers ever thought. In fact, they might be spinning at the very limits predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Perhaps it’s this extreme rotational speed that generates the energetic jets that blast out of the most […]

Are there massive black holes screaming around just outside our Galaxy?
A new study says: Maybe.
Globular clusters are roughly spherical clusters of stars, some with populations numbering in the millions. They’re old, as old as the Galaxy, which means they’ve been around billions of years. There are no young stars in globular clusters, which means there […]

Uh oh, this doesn’t sound good. It turns out there could be hundreds of rogue black holes, each weighing thousands of times the mass of the Sun, hurtling though the Milky Way. Oh, and they’d be almost impossible to spot.
Vanderbilt astronomer Kelly Holley-Bockelmann presented the results of a supercomputer simulation at the Winter meeting of […]

Centaurus A is a nearby galaxy which is bit of mess. Actually, it’s an incredible mess. 12 million light years away, it looks at first like an elliptical galaxy, an unassuming football of billions of stars. A closer look reveals a dark dust lane across the middle, which is our first hint things […]

 
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe. Just a single quasar can blaze more than a hundred times more brightly than our entire Milky Way galaxy. It turns out, though, that some of the brightest quasars in the Universe are hidden, cloaked behind a shroud of gas and dust. But now researchers […]