The Andromeda Mystery: Hubble Discovers Strange Galactic Behavior

The Andromeda Mystery: Hubble Discovers Strange Galactic Behavior

A Swarm of Dwarf Galaxies Buzz Around Our Milky Way’s Twin Imagine the Milky Way and Andromeda as two massive aircraft carriers, each surrounded by a fleet of smaller warships. These “warships” represent dwarf galaxies, which are much smaller in size and mass than their giant spiral hosts. The Milky Way has about 70 known [...]

X-ray astronomy is a somewhat neglected corner of the most general field of astronomy. The biggest names of telescopes, like Hubble and James Webb, do not even touch this bandwidth. And Chandra, the most space-capable X-ray observatory to date, is much less known. However, some of the [...]

Fifteen Years of X-Rays from Andromeda's Supermassive Black Hole

The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been keeping tabs on the Andromeda Galaxy for years. What do these observations tell us about the supermassive black hole at the center of our nearest major galactic neighbor? Examining a Moderate Black Hole Illustration of the relative sizes of the supermassive black holes at the center of the Milky Way (Sgr A*) and Messier 87 (M87*). Click to enlarge. [EHT collaboration (acknowledgment: Lia Medeiros, xkcd); CC…