The Hubble Space Telescope just snapped photos of the biggest black hole we've ever observed 

Chloe Olewitz,Digital Trends 12 hours ago

A new photograph of galaxy NGC 4889 may look peaceful from such a great distance, but it’s actually home to one of the biggest black holes that astronomers have ever identified. The Hubble Space Telescope allowed scientists to capture photos of the galaxy, located in the Coma Cluster about 300 million light-years away. The supermassive black hole hidden away in NGC 4889 breaks all kinds of records, even though it is currently classified as dormant.

So how big is it, exactly? Well, according to our best estimates, the supermassive black hole is roughly 21 billion times the size of the Sun, and its event horizon (an area so dense and powerful that light can’t escape its gravity) measures 130 billion kilometers in diameter. That’s about 15 times the diameter of Neptune’s orbit around the Sun, according to scientists at the Hubble Space Telescope. At one point, the black hole was fueling itself on a process called hot accretion. Space stuff like gases, dust, and galactic debris fell towards the black hole and created an accretion disk. Then that spinning disk of space junk, accelerated by the strong gravitational pull of the largest known black hole, emitted huge jets of energy out into the galaxy.

Related: Scientists just saw light coming from around a black hole for the first time

During that active period, NGC 4889 would have classified as a quasar (quasi-stellar radio source) thanks to the black hole’s emissions of up to a thousand times more energy than our Milky Way galaxy. But the black hole is now in dormant mode because there isn’t any more sustenance stored in the orbiting accretion disk. “The accretion disk sustained the supermassive black hole’s appetite until the nearby supply of galactic material was exhausted. Now, napping quietly as it waits for its next celestial snack, the supermassive black hole is dormant”, says the Hubble Space Telescope website.

Of course, the announcement posted with new photos of the NGC 4889 galaxy is quick to point out that the pictures don’t exactly capture the likeness of the supermassive black hole. It is impossible to observe a black hole directly, but scientists have been able to identify the implied presence of a black hole by analyzing the way celestial objects interact with some invisible force. For this particular black hole in the NGC 4889 galaxy, scientists used instruments on the Keck II Observatory and the Gemini North Telescope to measure the velocity of stars moving around the center point of the galaxy. The stars’ specific velocities re what allowed scientists to calculate the incredible size of NGC 4889’s black hole.

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The Hubble Space Telescope just snapped photos of the biggest black hole we've ever observed

NASA Releases 360-Degree Video Of Martian Surface

Posted yesterday by Emily Calandrelli (@TheSpaceGal)

COPY FROM:  http://techcrunch.com/2016/02/08/nasa-releases-360-degree-video-of-martian-surface/ 

Today, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a new 360-degree video, giving you a virtual tour of the Martian surface. The video was created by stitching together images taken by the Mars Curiosity Rover on December 18^th, 2015.

The scene takes place at Namib Dune with a view of Mount Sharp on the horizon. Curiosity’s Mast Camera took the images on the 1,197^th sol (a Martian day) of its mission. A Martian day is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day.
Open up the video in your phone’s YouTube app to view it best. By moving around your smartphone, you can get a high quality 360-degree look at Curiosity and its Martian surroundings.

The first version of this video was released on Facebook on January 30^th, but because of the way the images were stitched together, the horizon was warped and the resultant 360-degree panoramic image was disorienting. Today’s 360-degree image was a huge improvement on the first and gives a cleaner virtual experience.

This isn’t the first time a 360-degree image has been created from Curiosity’s photographs. Back in 2012, NASA released a similar panoramic look from a Curiosity site. But now that Facebook and YouTube allow users to upload 360-degree videos, the public has an interactive way to see the red planet.

Curiosity selfie / Image courtesy of NASA

NASA’s also famously used another one of Curiosity’s cameras to create a “rover selfie.” The scene above was generated by combining 57 different images taken from Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager, located on its robotic arm, on January 19^th, 2016.
In total, the Curiosity rover has 17 cameras, which are used for navigation, hazard avoidance and scientific analysis.

Curiosity’s 17 cameras / Image courtesy of NASA

Curiosity, NASA’s largest Mars rover, landed on Mars with the help of a sky-crane on August 6^th, 2012. The rover was designed to assess whether Mars has ever had an environment capable of supporting life.

Last spring, Curiosity discovered a unique rock formation in an area known as “Garden City” which suggests the existence of two distinctive wet periods in Mars’ history. Understanding the role of liquid water, a key ingredient for life as we know it, will help scientists determine if Mars currently supports, or has ever supported, life.

The nuclear powered rover also discovered rocks with very high amounts of silica in them. High-silica compositions are intriguing because they’re thought to be created from considerable water activity. Perhaps even more interesting, high silica deposits on Earth are often associated with places that support microbial life.

Curiosity’s science team is currently working on a couple different hypotheses to explain the rover’s discoveries and unravel the mystery of Mars’ past. Until then, the public can get a 360-degree look at the red planet we’ve yet to fully understand.