(Ben McKinley, ICRAR/Curtin & Connor Matherne, Louisiana State University)
Astronomers captured a stunning image of radio waves, showing our nearest radioactive black hole emitting huge jets of plasma that span more than 16x the size of the full moon in our sky.
The supermassive black hole in question is located in center of the galaxy centaurus A, about 12 million light years away.
The black hole has a staggering mass of around 55 million suns, but it is not visible in the image. It would be located within little empty patch in the center of the 2 butterfly wing like lobes.
When viewed from Earth, as in this photo, plasma erupting from the Centaurus A black hole extends 8 degrees across the sky – the length of 16 full moons placed side by side.
If it’s not crazy enough, consider this for a second – these dots in backgroound of the image are not stars. These are radio galaxies like Centaurus A, located much further away.
And the galaxy itself is not fully visible in this image because the radio jets are over a million light-years long, extend well beyond Centaurus A.
Of course, these “radio bubbles” of plasma, as they are called, are not visible to the human eye. It would be damn spectacular (but also a little scary) if they were.
They are visible in this image after the radio wave emissions were captured by the Murchison Widefield Array Telescope (MWA), located in an isolated part of Western Australia, away from other radio interference. This is the first time that we have been able to see it in such detail.
Above: A much closer look at Centaurus A, as seen in visible light, as well as X-ray (blue) and infrared (orange).
It’s especially cool when you realize that the plasma in these giant bubbles is moving near the speed of light when ejected out, as Centaur A’s black hole is sucking up matter nearby.
“These radio waves come from materials that are sucked into supermassive black hole in middle of the galaxy,” says astronomer Benjamin McKinley of Curtin University in Western Australia.
“Previous radio observations could not handle extreme brightness of the jets & the details of larger area surrounding the galaxy were distorted, but our new image overcomes these limitations.
The picture is not only breathtaking to look – the resulting research has in fact provided support to emerging new model known as ‘chaotic cold accretion’ or CCA.
“In this model, the cold gas clouds condense in galactic halo & rain down onto central regions, feeding supermassive black hole”, explains astrophysicist Massimo Gaspari of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Italy.
“Triggered by this rain, the black hole reacts vigorously by sending back energy via radio jets that inflate the spectacular lobes we see in the MWA image. This study is one of the first to probe in such detail the CCA multiphase “weather” over full range of scales.
MWA made up of 4,096 spider shaped antenna that extend across kilometers, organized in-to 256 grills called “tiles”.
The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.
