In a Hubble picture, a red circle indicates an object in a distant galaxy that could be an ejected black hole.

A super-massive black hole — heavier than one billion suns — appears headed on an exit out of its home galaxy at 670,000 miles-an-hour.

“We have located a peculiar X-ray source,” says the upcoming study in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal, led by Marianne Heida of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, “either a very blue type IIn supernova, a (X-ray star) with a very bright optical counterpart or a recoiling super-massive black hole.”

Noted by NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescope, the object called CXO J122518.6+144545 resides some 607,000 light years away in the SDSS DR7 galaxy (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.) Curiously, the object is about 10,500 light years outside the center of the galaxy, marked by an accompanying bright spot in the sky, noted by Hubble space telescope images.

Read complete article here. {via USA Today}

Butterfly emerges from stellar demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302. (Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is back in business, ready to uncover new worlds, peer ever deeper into space, and even map the invisible backbone of the universe.

The first snapshots from the refurbished Hubble showcase the 19-year-old telescope’s new vision. Topping the list of exciting new views are colorful multi-wavelength pictures of far- flung galaxies, a densely packed star cluster, an eerie “pillar of creation,” and a “butterfly” nebula.

With the release of these images, astronomers have declared Hubble a fully rejuvenated observatory. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., unveiled the images at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 9, 2009.

Read complete article here. {via Science Daily}

The Matter Of Everything is a feature documentary that challenges us to see beyond our everyday sense of experience into the unseen universe. From the quantum to the cosmos, The Matter Of Everything journeys deep out of the foundations of nature to reveal what we are, at billionths of the human scale. At that level, physicists at Fermilab, one of the largest particle research facilities in the world, describe a universe that is more unified than ever imagined. {source: RiverchoirFeed}

John E. Mack

Excellent article on the late Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John E. Mack.

On September 16, 1994, 62 children in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, said they saw a spacecraft land near their school. Some claimed they communed with the small, dark-eyed beings who emerged from it, and were warned about the damage humanity was inflicting upon planet Earth.

Two months later, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John E. Mack was on a plane to Africa, where “he interviewed 14 or 15 kids,” says Randy Nickerson, whose work-in-progress documentary, Encounter in Ruwa: The Ariel School Sighting, screens in Cambridge on Friday. “One of the things that really fascinated me was the consistency of their stories and drawings. It still astounds me.”

Mack, who died in 2004, founded the psychiatric department of Cambridge Hospital and won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize in biography for his portrait of T.E. Lawrence. His life’s work was “preoccupied with the issue of human identity,” says Dominique Callimanopulos, a former colleague who also worked on the film. And as the years wore on, he became more and more intrigued by how that identity fit into a “cosmic context,” and in exploring “our place in the universe,” says Callimanopulos.

Read complete article here. {via The Boston Phoenix}