supermassive black hole tagged posts

Cosmic Simulation Reveals How Black Holes Grow and Evolve

This still shows an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole.
This still from the simulation shows a supermassive black hole, or quasar, surrounded by a swirling disk of material called an accretion disk. Credit: Caltech/Phil Hopkins group

A team of astrophysicists led by Caltech has managed for the first time to simulate the journey of primordial gas dating from the early universe to the stage at which it becomes swept up in a disk of material fueling a single supermassive black hole. The new computer simulation upends ideas about such disks that astronomers have held since the 1970s and paves the way for new discoveries about how black holes and galaxies grow and evolve.

“Our new simulation marks the culmination of several years of work from two large collaborations started here at Caltech,” says Phil Hopkins, the Ira S...

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Iron Fingerprints in Nearby Active Galaxy

A XRISM spectrum of NGC 4151 with a multiwavelength snapshot of the galaxy in the background.
The Resolve instrument aboard XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) captured data from the center of galaxy NGC 4151, where a supermassive black hole is slowly consuming material from the surrounding accretion disk. The resulting spectrum reveals the presence of iron in the peak around 6.5 keV and the dips around 7 keV, light thousands of times more energetic that what our eyes can see. Background: An image of NGC 4151 constructed from a combination of X-ray, optical, and radio light.
Spectrum: JAXA/NASA/XRISM Resolve. Background: X-rays, NASA/CXC/CfA/J.Wang et al.; optical, Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, La Palma/Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope; radio, NSF/NRAO/VLA

After starting science operations in February, Japan-led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) studied the ...

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Our Galaxy’s Black Hole Not as Sleepy as thought

The first ever image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that sit at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy
The first ever image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that sit at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not as dormant as had been thought, a new study shows.

The slumbering giant woke up around 200 years ago to gobble up some nearby cosmic objects before going back to sleep, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

NASA’s IXPE space observatory spotted an Xray echo of this powerful resurgence of activity, the researchers said.

The supermassive black hole Sagittarius A—abbreviated to Sgr A—is four million times more massive than the Sun. It sits 27,000 light years from Earth at the center of the Milky Way’s spiral.

Last year astronomers revealed the first...

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A Distant Galaxy Ate All of its Friends. Now It’s All Alone

Composite image of a lonely galaxy containing a supermassive black hole, two jets, and an X-ray hotspot, all surrounded by hot gas. Credit: NASA MSFC/SAO/Chandra

Over 13 billion years ago, the first galaxies in the universe formed. They were elliptical, with intermediate black holes (IMBHs) at their centers surrounded by a halo of stars, gas, and dust. Over time, these galaxies evolved by flattening out into disks with a large bulge in the middle. They were then drawn together by mutual gravitational attraction to form galaxy clusters, massive collections that comprise the large-scale cosmic structure. This force of attraction also led to mergers, where galaxies and their central black holes came together to create larger spiral galaxies with central supermassive black holes (SMBHs).

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