A bright quasar powered by a supermassive black hole is blasting radiation that pushes surrounding gas clouds to produce winds reaching speeds of about 36 million miles per hour (58 million kilometers per hour). Oh, and the quasar is almost as old as the universe itself.
The discovery, made by a team of scientists led by University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomers, demonstrates the role that feeding at the hearts of supermassive black holes, called “active galactic nuclei” or “AGNs,” may play in shaping larger galaxies. galaxies around it.
The researchers reached their findings using eight years of data from quasar SBS 1408+544, located 13 billion light-years away in the constellation Bootes. These data were collected by the Black Hole Mapper Reverberation Mapping Project run by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The light of SBS 1408+544 has been heading towards Earth for 13 billion years; This is almost as long as the universe has existed for 13.8 billion years.
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While supermassive black holes with masses equivalent to millions, and sometimes even billions, of suns are thought to exist at the hearts of most galaxies, not all of them drive quasars. Quasar black holes are surrounded by material in a flattened, rotating cloud called an “accretion disk” that gradually feeds them with material.
The enormous gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole at the center of a quasar causes friction and tidal forces, heating the material of the accretion disk, causing it to glow intensely. Additionally, matter not fed into the supermassive black hole is directed by strong magnetic fields to the cosmic titan’s poles, where it is accelerated to near-light speeds and ejected into highly collimated jets. These binary jets from each black hole pole are also accompanied by emissions of electromagnetic radiation.
Not only does this radiation make some quasars brighter than the combined light of every star in the galaxies around them, but this light also shapes these galaxies, providing astronomers with a useful metric for gauging the impact of black holes on galaxies in general.
“The material inside [accretion] The disk is falling into the black hole all the time, and that drag and pull friction heats the disk and makes it very, very hot and very, very bright,” said team leader and University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomy professor Catherine Grier. “These quasars are really bright and far from the interior of the disk.” “Because it has a wide temperature range, its emissions cover almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum.”
The bright light from this particular quasar allowed Grier and his colleagues to track winds of gaseous carbon. This was done by measuring gaps in the broad spectrum of electromagnetic radiation emitted by the quasar; This showed that light was absorbed by carbon atoms.
The team found that each time they measured this absorption spectrum over 130 observations of SBS 1408+544, there was a shift from the correct location of the carbon absorption “shadow.” This increased over time as radiation from the quasar removed material from its surroundings. This material formed supermassive black hole winds that reached speeds of 36 million miles per hour (58 million kilometers per hour), about 45,000 times the speed of sound.
“This change tells us that gas is moving fast, and moving faster all the time,” said Robert Wheatley, co-leader of the team and a University of Wisconsin-Madison astronomy graduate. “The wind is accelerating because it is being pushed by radiation ejected from the accretion disk.”
Scientists have previously suspected they had detected accelerating supermassive black hole winds, but this is the first time the observation has been supported by solid evidence. Such cosmic winds are of great interest to astronomers because the gas they shift around them serves as the building blocks of stars. This means that if black hole winds are strong enough, they can disrupt star formation and thus “kill” host galaxies. They could also destroy the fuel of central supermassive black holes, ending their days as quasar machines.
This can turn an active galaxy into a quiet galaxy like the Milky Way, which, in addition to forming stars very slowly, has a “sleeping giant” black hole at its heart. Our black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), is surrounded by so little matter that its diet of gas and dust is equivalent to a human being eating one grain of rice every million years. Alternatively, winds from supermassive black holes could compress gas rather than pushing it, triggering new star formation in host galaxies.
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Black hole winds like the one the team saw can travel beyond the outskirts of galaxies, affecting neighboring galaxies and eventually neighboring supermassive black holes at the hearts of those galaxies.
“Supermassive black holes are big, but compared to their galaxies, they’re really tiny,” Grier said. “This doesn’t mean they can’t ‘talk’ to each other, and this is a form of conversation that we need to take into account when modeling the effects of such black holes.”
The team’s research was published in The Astrophysical Journal in June.