A team of scientists using Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputers has discovered the first plausible explanation for a pulsar’s spin that fits the observations made by astronomers. Anthony Mezzacappa of the Department of Energy lab’s Physics Division and John Blondin of North Carolina State University explain their results in the newest issue of the journal “Nature”.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20070105-00

Stellar mass black holes have been discovered, and astronomers now believe that supermassive black holes exist at the centres of most galaxies. But now a black hole has been discovered inside a globular star cluster. This could be one of the elusive “intermediate-mass” black holes. Globular clusters contain thousands, or even millions of stars, and astronomers never thought they could hold a black hole. Computer simulations predicted that a black hole that formed in the cluster would sink into the centre of the cluster, but then inevitably get slung out into space after gravitational interaction with the stars in the cluster. This new black hole was found by ESA’s XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, which was able to spot the tell-tale X-ray signature of a black hole. The black hole is located inside a globular cluster in the relatively nearby elliptical galaxy NGC 4472, located about 50 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster. It’s possible that it gained mass by merging with other black holes, and consuming enough material that it could lock its position inside the middle of the galaxy. With enough mass, the stars in the cluster just wouldn’t be able to eject it.
Black hole boldly goes where no black hole has gone before

DEM L238 and DEM L249 are two supernova remnants in the Large Magellanic Cloud. X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton observatories suggest that the stars responsible for these debris fields were unusually young when they were destroyed by thermonuclear explosions.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2007/deml238/

At the end of December 2006, a fascinating experiment was conducted over Antarctica by Canada and its partners, the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico. Attached to a huge helium balloon, a large aperture sub-millimetre telescope called BLAST peered deep into space to study the earliest stages of star and planet formation, and to make high-resolution maps of diffuse galactic emissions.
Canadian Space Agency: BLAST Mission 2006 – Antarctica

To see any distance in space, you need some kind of telescope. We’ve got some pretty powerful ones here on Earth, but nature has us beat with gravitational lenses. This is a phenomenon when a relatively nearby object passes directly between us and a more distant object. The gravity from the nearby object acts like a telescope lens to bend light and magnify the more distant object. Until now, these gravitational lenses have been single stars or distant galaxies, but now a new class of lenses is being called into service: entire groups of galaxies! The research is being done as part of the Canada-France-Hawaii Legacy Survey which will devote 500 nights of telescope time over the next 5 years.

R. A. Cabanac et al.: The CFHTLS strong lensing legacy survey (PDF)

New observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope strongly suggest that infrared light detected in a prior study originated from clumps of the very first objects of the universe. The recent data indicate this patchy light is splattered across the entire sky and comes from clusters of bright, monstrous objects more than 13 billion light-years away. Astronomers believe the objects are either the first stars – humongous stars more than 1.000 times the mass of our sun – or voracious black holes that are consuming gas and spilling out tons of energy. If the objects are stars, then the observed clusters might be the first mini-galaxies containing a mass of less than about one million suns.
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/news/248-ssc2006-22-NASA-Telescope-Picks-Up-Glow-of-Universe-s-First-Objects

The small open star cluster Pismis 24 lies in the core of the large emission nebula NGC 6357 in Sagittarius, about 8.000 light-years away from Earth. Some of the stars in this cluster are extremely massive and emit intense ultraviolet radiation. The brightest object in this cluster is designated Pismis 24-1. It was once thought to weigh as much as 200 to 300 solar masses. This would not only have made it by far the most massive known star in the galaxy, but would have put it considerably above the currently believed upper mass limit of about 150 solar masses for individual stars. Now, Hubble Space Telescope high-resolution images of the star show that it is really two stars orbiting one another. They are estimated to be 100 solar masses each.
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2006/54/image/

A trio of space telescopes have combined to create a stunning image of the N49 supernova remnant in the Milky Way’s neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Spitzer Space Telescope imaged relatively cool gas toward the outer edge of the remnant in infrared, seen in red. The blue in the centre of the image, taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory, indicates extremely hot gas. The Hubble Space Telescope is responsible for the optical view of white and yellow filaments.
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/n49/

Astronomers using the H.E.S.S. telescopes have discovered the first ever modulated signal from space in Very High Energy Gamma Rays – the most energetic such signal ever observed. Regular signals from space have been known since the 1960s, when the first radio pulsar was discovered. This is the first time a signal has been seen at such high energies – 100.000 times higher than previously known – and is reported in the Journal “Astronomy and Astrophysics”.

http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/hfm/HESS/pages/press/old/PressRelease/LS5039Press-2006/PressRelease_E.html

ESA’s Integral space observatory has spotted a blast of gamma rays from a suspected black hole in the Milky Way. The outburst occurred on September 17, 2006, and gradually built in brightness over the course of a few days before declining again. It’s this rise and fall of brightness, called a light curve, that allowed astronomers identify the source as a black hole. It’s likely that a disk of gas and material orbiting the black hole became unstable, and a portion of it collapsed, creating the outburst.

Integral catches a new erupting black hole

The results, described in the article “IGJ 717497-2821: A new X-ray Nova” by Roland Walter et al., appeared in “Astronomy and Astrophysics 461, L17-L20 (2007)”. A free access online version can be found at
http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2007/02/aa6520-06.pdf