ALMA | National Astronomical Observatory of Japan | 2020 Mar 27
Astronomers obtained the first resolved image of disturbed gaseous clouds in a galaxy 11 billion light-years away by using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The team found that the disruption is caused by young powerful jets ejected from a supermassive black hole residing at the center of the host galaxy. This result will cast light on the mystery of the evolutionary process of galaxies in the early Universe.
It is commonly known that black holes exert strong gravitational attraction on surrounding matter. However, it is less well known that some black holes have fast-moving streams of ionized matter, called jets. In some nearby galaxies, evolved jets blow off galactic gaseous clouds, resulting in suppressed star formation. Therefore, to understand the evolution of galaxies, it is crucial to observe the interaction between black hole jets and gaseous clouds throughout cosmic history. However, it had been difficult to obtain clear evidence of such interaction, especially in the early Universe.
In order to obtain such clear evidence, the team used ALMA to observe an interesting object known as MG J0414+0534. A distinctive feature of MG J0414+0534 is that the paths of light traveling from it to Earth are significantly distorted by the gravity of another ‘lensing’ galaxy between MG J0414+0534 and us, causing significant magnification. ...
Another feature is that MG J0414+0534 has a supermassive black hole with bipolar jets at the center of the host galaxy. The team was able to reconstruct the ‘true’ image of gaseous clouds as well as the jets in MG J0414+0534 by carefully accounting for the gravitational effects exerted by the intervening lensing galaxy. ...
ALMA 50-Parsec Resolution Imaging of Jet-ISM Interaction in the Lensed Quasar MG J0414+0534 ~ Kaiki Taro Inoue et al
- Astrophysical Journal Letters 892(2):L18 (2020 Apr 01) DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab7b7e
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2003.01650 > 03 Mar 2020