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Turning off the Lights

StarDate: 
February 26, 2018
Quasar 3c 298
'Pushy' Black Hole

A giant black hole at the center of a galaxy more than nine billion light-years away is blowing massive winds throughout the galaxy, perhaps shutting down the birth of new stars. The black hole is near the center of the bright blob just below center in this image, which combines observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and ALMA, a radio telescope in Chile. The winds are depicted in blue, while green shows gas around the black hole. Charged particles are captured by a powerful magnetic field and shot into space as "jets" before the particles can enter the black hole. These jets push away the surrounding gas, preventing it from collapsing to form new stars. [A Vayner and team]

 

Image of the quasar host galaxy from the UC San Diego research team’s data. The distance to this quasar galaxy is ~9.3 billion light years. The four-color image shows findings from use of the Keck Observatory and ALMA. As seen from Keck Observatory, the green colors highlight the energetic gas across the galaxy that is being illuminated by the quasar. The blue color represents powerful winds blowing throughout the galaxy. The red-orange colors represent the cold molecular gas in the system as seen from ALMA. The supermassive black hole sits at the center of the bright red-orange circular area slightly below the middle of the image. Credit: A. Vayner and team

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-12-astronomers-formation-black-holes-galaxies.html#jCp

A supermassive black hole appears to be “blowing out the candles” in its home galaxy. It’s producing a strong wind that’s blowing away the gas around it, shutting down the birth of new stars.

A team led by Shelley Wright of the University of California-San Diego used telescopes on the ground and in space to study a galaxy known as 3c 298. It’s more than nine billion light-years away. That means we see the galaxy as it looked more than nine billion years ago, when the universe was just a third of its present age. And the galaxy is merging with a smaller galaxy.

The heart of 3c 298 contains a black hole that’s a few billion times the mass of the Sun. The black hole is surrounded by a disk of gas that’s spiraling into the black hole. As it gets close, the gas is heated to extreme temperatures, so the disk shines brilliantly. That creates a quasar — one of the brightest objects in the universe.

Observations of 3c 298 show that huge amounts of gas are moving away from the quasar — enough to make thousands of Sun-sized stars every year. The gas appears to be pushed by jets of particles that are shooting out from the poles of the black hole. The jets create strong winds that blow through the entire galaxy. At least for a while, this “feedback” from the black hole will limit the number of stars that are born in the heart of this young, busy galaxy.

Script by Damond Benningfield

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