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Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to image the dust and gas structure around a distant supermassive black hole and found a literal “shock” feature.
The team discovered that the energy heating up this swirling cloud of gas and dust actually comes from collisions with jets of gas moving at speeds close to the speed of light, or “shocks.” Scientists had previously suggested that the energy heating up this dust came from the supermassive black hole itself, which was an unexpected development.
The galactic home of this particular supermassive black hole is ESO 428-G14, an active galaxy located about 70 million light-years from Earth. The term “active galaxy” means that ESO 428-G14 has a central region or “active galactic nucleus” (AGN) that emits powerful and intense light across the electromagnetic spectrum due to the presence of a supermassive black hole that feeds greedily on matter around it.
The shocking AGN finding was achieved by members of the Galactic Activity, Torus and Outflow Survey (GATOS) collaboration, which uses dedicated JWST observations to study the centers of nearby galaxies.
“There is a lot of debate about how AGNs transfer energy to their surroundings,” GATOS team member David Rosario, a senior lecturer at Newcastle University, said in a statement. “We didn’t expect radio jets to cause this kind of damage. And here it is!”
Relating toDark matter may act as ‘matchmaker’ for supermassive black holes
Secrets of a “noisy” black hole revealed
Supermassive black holes with masses ranging from millions to billions of times that of the sun are thought to reside at the centre of all large galaxies, but not all of these black holes are located within AGNs.
Take our Milky Way, for example. Our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is surrounded by so little matter that its matter “diet” is equivalent to a person living on one grain of rice each day. million That makes Sgr A*, which has a mass equal to about 4.3 million Suns, a “quiet” black hole, but it certainly has some noisy neighbors.
Consider the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87), about 55 million light-years away. Not only is this black hole, M87*, much larger than Sgr A*, it has a mass of about 6.5 billion The Sun has a lot of gas and dust around it and it feeds on these.
This matter can’t fall directly into M87* because it carries angular momentum. This means that a flat, swirling cloud of gas and dust called an “accretion disk” forms around the supermassive black hole, which is slowly feeding it.
Supermassive black holes don’t just sit in their accretion disks, passively waiting to be fed like a cosmic baby in a high chair. The immense gravitational pull of these cosmic titans creates a buildup of massive tidal forces on the accretion disk, heating it to temperatures as high as 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius).
This causes the accretion disk to shine brightly, powering some of the AGN’s illumination. The immense gravitational influence of these cosmic titans creates enormous tidal forces on the accretion disk, heating it to temperatures as high as 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (10 million degrees Celsius).
But that’s not all.
Like a naughty toddler, not all of a supermassive black hole’s “food” goes into its “mouth.” Strong magnetic fields direct some of the matter in the accretion disks toward the black hole’s poles, in the process accreting these charged particles to near the speed of light. Like your child throwing food at you.
From the two poles of the black hole, this matter is ejected outward as parallel astrophysical jets. These jets are also accompanied by the emission of light across the electromagnetic spectrum, especially strong in radio waves.
As a result of these contributions, AGNs can become so bright that they can outshine the combined light of every star in the galaxy surrounding them.
Dust surrounding AGNs can often block our view of their hearts by absorbing visible light and other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. But infrared light can bypass this dust, and JWST sees the universe clearly in infrared, making the powerful space telescope a perfect tool for peering into the core of AGNs.
When the GATOs team did this for ESO 428-G14, they found that dust near the supermassive black hole was spread out along its jet. This revealed an unexpected relationship between the jets and the dust, suggesting that these powerful outflows may be responsible for both heating and shaping the dust.
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Further study of the connection between jets and dust around supermassive black holes may reveal the influence of these cosmic titans in shaping their galaxies and how material is recycled in AGNs.
“Having the opportunity to work with exclusive JWST data and have access to these stunning images before anyone else is beyond exciting,” said Houda Haidar, a PhD student in the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics at Newcastle University. “I feel incredibly lucky to be part of the GATOS team. It’s a real privilege to work closely with leading experts in the field.”
The team’s research was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.