english.jpnn.com, WASHINGTON - Researchers found a doughnut-shaped cloud of cosmic dust and gas shrouding a massive black hole at the heart of a galaxy similar in size to our Milky Way.
These observations give scientists new clarity about the most energetic objects in the universe.
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Scientists on Wednesday said their observations involving the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy Messier 77 and the clouds around it support predictions made three decades ago about so-called "active galactic nuclei".
It is a place found at the center of many large galaxies with extraordinary luminosity - sometimes brighter than all the billions of galactic stars combined - and producing the most energetic explosions in the universe since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
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Energy arises from gas falling violently into a supermassive black hole surrounded by a cloud of tiny particles of rock and soot along with mostly hydrogen gas.
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects that have a gravitational pull so strong that even light cannot escape. The supermassive black hole, which is at the center of many galaxies, including our own, is the largest.
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Messier 77, also called NGC 1068 or the Squid Galaxy, lies 47 million light years — the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km) — from Earth in the constellation Cetus. Its supermassive black hole has a mass about 10 million times greater than our sun.
The observations, using the Southern European Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert, provide strong support for the so-called "unified model" of active galactic nuclei.
This model states that all active galactic nuclei are essentially the same but that some appear from Earth's perspective to have different properties.
Some appear very bright because the cloud's ring-like position doesn't obscure the gas falling into the black hole from our perspective, while others appear dark because the clouds block our view of what's really going on.
The core of the active galaxy Messier 77 is a dark one, but new observations suggest that it actually has the same qualities as the bright one.
"The dust and gas in these clouds are probably blown out of the atmospheres of stars at a larger distance - hundreds of light years - from the black hole, and are falling in towards the center under the influence of the black hole gravity," said Violeta Gamez Rosas, a doctoral student in astronomy at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.
"Some clouds spiral in towards the black hole while others are pushed up into a 'fountain' that falls back onto the galaxy. Because of the dust, it is very difficult to see with telescopes what is going on in this region, but it is easier at infrared wavelengths than at normal visible wavelengths because the dust does not absorb infrared light as much," said study co-author Walter Jaffe, a Leiden University astronomy professor.
The Milky Way's supermassive black hole, which has a mass 4 million times greater than the sun, is currently "fairly quiet," Gamez Rosas said, but may have previously been more active like Messier 77.
Gamez Rosas expressed satisfaction studying active galactic nuclei.
"A lot of it is pure fascination with explosions on such gigantic scales, and the challenge of trying to explain them with what we think we know about physics," Gamez Rosas said.
"There is also the challenge of trying to build and operate telescopes to make these images of things so far away," Gamez Rosas added.
"And there is the peace of mind that results from the knowledge that there is a large, complex, varied universe that goes its own way whatever we do on Earth." (reuters/ant/dil/mcr20/jpnn)
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