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Astronomers using the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope have discovered a disc of unexpected material swirling furiously around a supermassive black hole in the center of NGC 3147, a low-luminosity spiral galaxy located about 130 million years old. -Light of distance.
View of an artist on the particularly thin disc of a material surrounding a supermassive black hole in the heart of NGC 3147. Credit: Mr Kornmesser / ESA / Hubble.
Dr. Stefano Bianchi of Università degli Studi Roma Tre and his colleagues initially chose NGC 3147 to validate the accepted models for active galaxies at lower luminosity: those with malnourished black holes.
"The type of disc we see is a reduced quasar that we did not expect to exist," Dr. Bianchi said.
"It's the same type of disc we see in 1,000 or even 100,000 times brighter objects. Predictions of current models for very weak active galaxies have clearly failed. "
Black holes in certain types of galaxies such as NGC 3147 are considered hungry because the material captured by gravitation does not allow them to be fed regularly.
It is therefore curious that a thin disc surrounding a hungry black hole mimics the much larger discs found in extremely active galaxies.
This disk of material surrounding the black hole is of particular interest and offers a unique opportunity to test Albert Einstein's theories of relativity.
The disc is so deeply buried in the intense gravitational field of the black hole that the light of the gas disc is altered, according to these theories, offering astronomers a unique insight into the dynamic processes close to the black hole.
"We have never seen the effects of both general relativity and special relativity in visible light with such clarity," said Dr. Marco Chiaberge, of AURA for ESA, STScI and Johns Hopkins Univeristy.
NGC 3147 is relatively close, at a distance of about 130 million light-years, and is in the constellation Draco. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Riess et al.
Hubble measured that the disc material revolved around the black hole at more than 10% of the speed of light.
At such extreme speeds, the gas seems to lighten as it goes to Earth on one side and attenuates as it goes on. he is moving away from our planet from the other. This effect is known as the relativistic beam.
Hubble's observations also show that the gas is buried so deep in a gravitational well that the light is struggling to escape, and thus appears stretched at wavelengths that are more red. The mass of the black hole is about 250 million solar masses.
"It's an intriguing look at a record very close to a black hole, so narrow that the velocities and intensity of the gravitational pull affect the way we perceive the photons of light," he said. Dr. Bianchi.
The results were published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
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Stefano Bianchi et al. 2019. HST unveils a compact and relatively relativistic enlarged region in the type 2 NGC 3147 candidate. MNRASL 488 (1): L1-L5; doi: 10.1093 / mnrasl / slz080
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