Quasars & Active Galaxies

This image of Centaurus A shows a spectacular new view of a supermassive black hole's power. Jets and lobes powered by the central black hole in this nearby galaxy are shown by submillimeter data (colored orange) from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope in Chile and X-ray data (colored blue) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Visible light data from the Wide Field Imager on the Max-Planck/ESO 2.2 m telescope, also located in Chile, shows the dust lane in the galaxy and background stars.

We recently featured a composite image of Chandra and Hubble data of the object known as M87. This object, which gets its name from being the 87th object in Charles Messier's catalog, is the giant elliptical galaxy in what is known as the Virgo Cluster. If you are interested in astronomy, you have probably heard of the Virgo Cluster. What makes this cluster of galaxies so important that it seems like astronomers use every type of telescope to study it?

Hello! Hopefully by now you'll have read a little about 3C 321, aka the "Death Star Galaxy" from last week's blog entry, which was a transcribed from a presentation I gave a few months ago. I wanted to take this opportunity to give you the insider's view on how we came to discover this amazing system, the point when we knew we had a pretty major result on our hands, and the media frenzy that ensued.

Dr. Dan Evans from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, shares some information on 3c321, as of December 2007 now known as the Death Star Galaxy. Dan Evans has never seen Star Wars, so who came up with the nickname? Read on.

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NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has opened up a new era of performing x-ray astronomy and x-ray astrophysics.