• Astronomers discover how to feed a black

    From ScienceDaily@1:317/3 to All on Thu Jul 29 21:30:42 2021
    Astronomers discover how to feed a black hole

    Date:
    July 29, 2021
    Source:
    Instituto de Astrofi'sica de Canarias (IAC)
    Summary:
    Researchers have discovered long narrow dust filaments which
    surround and feed black holes in the centers of galaxies, and
    which could be the natural cause of the darkening of the centers
    of many galaxies when their nuclear black holes are active.



    FULL STORY ==========================================================================
    The black holes at the centres of galaxies are the most mysterious objects
    in the Universe, not only because of the huge quantities of material
    within them, millions of times the mass of the Sun, but because of the incredibly dense concentration of matter in a volume no bigger than that
    of our Solar System.

    When they capture matter from their surroundings they become active,
    and can send out enormous quantities of energy from the capture process, although it is not easy to detect the black hole during these capture
    episodes, which are not frequent.


    ========================================================================== However, a study led by the researcher Almudena Prieto, of the Instituto
    de Astrofi'sica de Canarias (IAC), has discovered long narrow dust
    filaments which surround and feed these black holes in the centres of
    galaxies, and which could be the natural cause of the darkening of the
    centres of many galaxies when their nuclear black holes are active. The
    results of this study have recently been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

    Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Very Large Telescope
    (VLT) at the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA) in Chile, the scientists have been able to obtain
    a direct visualization of the process of nuclear feeding of a black hole
    in the galaxy NGC 1566 by these filaments. The combined images show a
    snapshot in which one can see how the dust filaments separate, and then
    go directly towards the centre of the galaxy, where they circulate and
    rotate in a spiral around the black hole before being swallowed by it.

    "This group of telescopes has given us a completely new perspective of a supermassive black hole, thanks to the imaging at high angular resolution
    and the panoramic visualization of its surroundings, because it lets
    us follow the disappearance of the dust filaments as they fall into the
    black hole," explains Almudena Prieto, the first author on the paper.

    The study is the result of the long-term PARSEC project of the IAC,
    which aims to understand how supermassive black holes wake up from their
    long lives of hibernation, and after a process in which they accrete
    material from their surroundings, they become the most powerful objects
    in the Universe.

    Part of this work was carried out within the Master's thesis in
    Astrophysics of the University of La Laguna of Jakub Nadolny, carried
    out at the IAC within the PARSEC project. Researchers Mar Mezcua and Juan
    A. Ferna'ndez Ontiveros were also advisers to this work, while they had
    PARSEC postdoctoral contracts at the IAC.

    ========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Instituto_de_Astrofi'sica_de_Canarias_(IAC). Note: Content may be edited
    for style and length.


    ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
    1. M Almudena Prieto, Jakub Nadolny, Juan A Ferna'ndez-Ontiveros, Mar
    Mezcua. Dust in the central parsecs of unobscured AGN: more
    challenges to the torus. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
    Society, 2021; 506 (1): 562 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab1704 ==========================================================================

    Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210729143436.htm

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