Microlensing measurement of a quasar's accretion disk

An active galactic nucleus (AGN) is a supermassive black hole residing at the core of a galaxy that is accreting material. The accretion occurs in the vicinity of the hot torus around the nucleus, and it can generate rapidly ...

Astrophysicists wear 3-D glasses to watch quasars

A team of researchers from Russia and Greece reports a way to determine the origins and nature of quasar light by its polarization. The new approach is analogous to the way cinema glasses produce a 3-D image by feeding each ...

Globular cluster billowing in the galactic wind

The galactic magnetic field plays an important role in the evolution of the galaxy, but its small-scale behaviour is still poorly known. It is also unknown whether it permeates the halo of the galaxy or not. By using observations ...

Second stellar population found in Milky Way's thick disk

A new study on the kinematics and chemical composition of a sample of stars in the vicinity of the sun, led by Dr. Daniela Carollo, researcher of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, has revealed that the stars ...

Going against the flow around a supermassive black hole

At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study this ...

Chandra detection of a circumnuclear torus

Most galaxies host supermassive black holes at their nuclei, each with millions or billions of solar-masses of material. There is thought to be a torus of dust and gas around the black holes, and an accreting disk that becomes ...

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