Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
Scientists have spotted wind from a supermassive black hole blowing at much greater distances than ever before.
Astronomer Mark Lacy and colleagues used the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile to observe the universe’s first light, and found evidence of gusts flowing from a type of black hole called a quasar. The wind extends about 228,000 light-years away from the galaxy that surrounds the quasar. Previously, astronomers had seen signs of these winds only about 3,000 light-years from their galaxies.
The result, published November 12 at arXiv.org, could help resolve questions about how black holes can grow with their galaxies, or shut galaxies down for good.
Black holes are best known for gravitationally gobbling everything that veers too close. Paradoxical as it sounds, supermassive black holes can also send material in the opposite direction, driving powerful flows of charged gas and plasma away from their host galaxies.
These black holes are victims of their own success, pulling in more material than they can consume at once. The excess material surrounds black holes in a tight swirling disk, where friction heats it to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius. The black hole plus that bright disk is a quasar.
All that heat, plus some help from magnetic fields, create great gusts that carry gas and plasma away (SN Online: 3/6/17). “The black hole can’t swallow all of that stuff,” says Lacy, of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va.
“It has to blow some of it out.”Measuring such winds’ extent and energies could help scientists figure out how material spit out by the black holes might influence the way the galaxies grow and evolve. If the wind doesn’t…
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