Black Holes and Exploding Stars

Cygnus OB2, located about 4,700 light-years away, hosts some 3,000 hot stars, including about 100 in the O class. Weighing in at more than a dozen times the sun's mass and sporting surface temperatures five to ten times hotter, these ginormous blue-white stars blast their surroundings with intense ultraviolet light and powerful outflows called stellar winds.

Newborn stars firing out jets of matter as seen in images captured over time by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists have created fascinating movie sequences showing their progress out into space.

A 26,000 light year zoom takes us into the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. The speeds and orbits of stars were used to calculate the mass of the central object, a black hole of 4 million solar masses. From ESO.

Astronomers recently discovered the largest known reservoir of rare metals in the universe in the central region of the Perseus galaxy cluster, including vast amounts of chromium. Thumbnail: "The Robot (3) 20102007" by Emile Noordeloos.

An immense, thick cloud of dust is gathering around the center of our galaxy. Here's what will happen in about 10 million years when the cloud collapses into a supermassive black hole.

Take a ride on the Black Hole Flight Simulator, courtesy of Professor Andrew Hamilton.