Royal Astronomical Society | 20 Sep 2018
A UK team of astronomers report the first detection of matter falling into a black hole at 30% of the speed of light, located in the centre of the billion-light year distant galaxy PG1211+143 ...
Black holes are objects with such strong gravitational fields that not even light travels quickly enough to escape their grasp, hence the description ‘black’. They are hugely important in astronomy because they offer the most efficient way of extracting energy from matter. As a direct result, gas in-fall – accretion – onto black holes must be powering the most energetic phenomena in the Universe. ...
The orbit of the gas around the black hole is often assumed to be aligned with the rotation of the black hole, but there is no compelling reason for this to be the case. In fact, the reason we have summer and winter is that the Earth’s daily rotation does not line up with its yearly orbit around the Sun.
Until now it has been unclear how misaligned rotation might affect the in-fall of gas. This is particularly relevant to the feeding of supermassive black holes since matter (interstellar gas clouds or even isolated stars) can fall in from any direction. ...
An Ultrafast Inflow in the Luminous Seyfert PG1211+143 ~ KA Pounds et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 481(2):1832 (Dec 2018) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/sty2359
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1808.09373 > 28 Aug 2018
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