The black hole at the center of the A galaxy has been imaged. Ben McKinley, ICRAR/Curtin and Connor Matherne are from Louisiana State University.
The eruption from the black hole that spans the size of 16 full moons is detailed in a detailed image.
The black hole's radio emissions show huge lobes of plasma spreading far away from the center of the home galaxy, Centaurus A.
The fifth-brightest galaxy in the sky is called Centaurus A, which is some 12 million light-years from Earth. The monster with the mass of 55 million suns is at the center of the center. The black hole creates huge bubbles in the image by eating gas, dust and other material in its vicinity, then expelling it in the form of powerful jets that spread far away into space.
A powerful jet emerges from a black hole.
There is a small patch at the center of the image. The dots in the background are not stars, but other similar, but far away, galaxies. The stars in the foreground are in our own galaxy.
The image was captured with a wide field of view and a quiet location in the Australian desert.
Benjamin McKinley, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia and lead author of a new study about the eruption, said in a statement that the image consists of radio, optical and X-ray observations.
The black hole's radio plasma is displayed in blue and appears to interact with hot X-ray emitting gas and cold neutral hydrogen. The H-alpha lines are characteristic of hydrogen that is losing electrons.
"Previous radio observations could not handle the extreme brightness of the jets and details of the larger area surrounding the galaxy were distorted, but our new image overcomes these limitations," said McKinley.
McKinley said that the galaxy appears brighter at the center, where the energy is concentrated. The matter appears fainter as the energy goes toward the outskirts.
The study corroborates a novel theory known as "haotic cold accretion", which is emerging in different fields.
The model states that clouds of cold gas condense in the halo and rain down on the central regions, feeding the black hole. The black hole reacts by launching energy back via radio jets that inflate the spectacular lobes we see in the image. This study is one of the first to investigate the multiphase CCA weather over the full range of scales.
The study was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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