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EI2GYB > ASTRO 29.08.21 10:56l 78 Lines 3782 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 13838_EI2GYB
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Subj: Astronomers discover how to feed a black hole
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Sent: 210829/0854Z @:EI2GYB.DGL.IRL.EURO #:13838 BPQ6.0.22
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Astronomers discover how to feed a black hole
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.
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 Astrof¡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.
Fern ndez Ontiveros were also advisers to this work, while they had
PARSEC postdoctoral contracts at the IAC.
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