ESA | Space Science | Herschel | 2015 Mar 26
Astronomers using ESA’s Herschel space observatory have found that the winds blowing from a huge black hole are sweeping away its host galaxy’s reservoir of raw star-building material.
Found at the hearts of most galaxies, supermassive black holes are extremely dense and compact objects with masses between millions and billions of times that of our Sun.
Many are relatively passive, like the one sitting at the centre of our Milky Way. However, some of them are devouring their surroundings with a great appetite.
These active black holes not only feed on nearby gas but also expel some of it as powerful winds and jets. Astronomers have long suspected these outflows to be responsible for draining galaxies of their interstellar gas, in particular the gas molecules from which stars are born.
This could eventually affect a galaxy’s star-forming activity, slowing it down or possibly quenching it entirely.
Until now, it had not been possible to capture a complete view of this process. While astronomers were able to detect winds very close to black holes using X-ray telescopes, and to trace much larger galactic outflows of gas molecules through infrared observations, they had not succeeded at finding both in the same galaxy.
A new study has changed the scene, detecting winds driven by one particular black hole from the smallest to largest scales. ...
Suzaku, Herschel Link a Black-hole 'Wind' to a Galactic Gush of Star-forming Gas
NASA | GSFC | 2015 Mar 25
Supermassive Black Hole Blasts Star-Making Gas From Galaxy’s Core
University of Maryland, College Park | 2015 Mar 25
How Black Holes Clear Galaxies of Star-Making Gas
ESA | Science & Technology | Herschel | 2015 Mar 25
Wind from the black-hole accretion disk driving a molecular outflow in an active galaxy - Francesco Tombesi et al
- Nature 519(7544) 436 (26 Mar 2015) DOI: 10.1038/nature14261
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1501.07664 > 30 Jan 2015 (v1), 25 Mar 2015 (v2)