Next week’s night sky:
The annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower is produced by particles of material left behind by repeated passages of Halley’s Comet. The shower, which runs from April 19 to May 28, will peak in intensity before dawn on Thursday, May 6. Aquarids meteors will appear to be travelling away from a radiant point in Aquarius. That spot will lie near the southeastern horizon, not far from Jupiter. The southerly radiant makes this shower better for observers at low latitudes. On the peak night, watch for up to a few dozen meteors per hour, including some fireballs. A 25%-illuminated, waning crescent moon in the sky on the peak morning will reduce the number of meteors seen.
A rare double Quasar
All galaxies have monsters lurking in their cores: supermassive black holes that are millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun. And when galaxies merge, so, too, do these black holes, which slowly creep closer over millions of years.
During that time, the gravitational effects of the merging galaxies and their black holes funnel stars, planets, gas, and dust to the center. That material begins to swirl into the black holes, forming a hot, bright accretion disk around each one that is visible across the universe.
Such a brightly shining disk around a supermassive black hole is called a quasar.
Normally, quasars hang out by themselves, pulling in material from the young galaxies in which they form. And once the galaxy settles down, its quasar shuts down as the black hole consumes all the nearby material and runs out of food. But chaotic events like galaxy mergers can reignite quasars, resulting in a unique double quasar pair that ultimately merges into a single, brighter, and even more massive black hole. Astronomers estimate that one out of every 1,000 quasars is actually a double quasar, although some of them sit too close to one another to be visibly separated at such great distances.
Do you have any cool astronomy research news from this week? Share it in the comments below!