See the material sucked into a black hole at 30% of the speed of light – Astronomy Now

A team of British astronomers detected that gas was being sucked into a supermassive black hole located in the heart of a galaxy, a billion light years from Earth. The speed of light reaches 30%, about 100,000 kilometers per day. second.

It is thought that black holes with millions to billions of times the Sun's mass are hidden in the nuclei of most, if not all, galaxies. By definition, black holes can not be seen, but they can be detected by the radiation emitted when gas and dust are sucked up and heated to enormous temperatures before crossing the point of no return.

But even the supermassive black holes are so compact that the gas tends to spin around them instead of falling directly, forming a rotating accretion disk in which the material spirals inward, accelerated by enormous gravity the hole.

Astronomers assumed that the disc would be aligned with the axis of rotation of the black hole, but it was not necessary. As it turns out that misaligned rotation can result in several rings of debris, providing a mechanism for gas and even whole stars to be dragged into a super-massive black hole in any direction.

A team led by Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester has used the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope to observe the environment of a black hole of 40 million solar masses at the heart of a galaxy Seyfert called PG1211 + 143. in the constellation Coma Berenices.

They observed strongly red-shifted spectra showing the trapped gas, with almost no rotation around the hole, being drawn at 30% of the speed of light. The observation was in agreement with theoretical work that simulated the formation of misaligned accretion disks and subsequent collisions.

The British Dirac supercomputer installation indicated that such a collision would cancel the rotation of the rings, allowing the gas to fall directly into the black hole.

"The galaxy we observed with XMM-Newton has a black hole of 40 million solar masses that is very bright and obviously well-fed," said Pounds. "Indeed, about fifteen years ago, we detected a strong wind indicating that the hole was supercharged. While such winds are now present in many active galaxies, the PG1211 + 143 has now given another "first", with the detection of the material plunging directly into the hole itself.

He said that XMM-Newton was able to follow "a group of matter the size of the Earth for about a day because it was pulled toward the black hole, accelerating up to one-third the speed of light before to be engulfed by the hole.

Misaligned accretion disks may be common around supermassive black holes, which spin more slowly and grow rapidly, explaining how the holes that formed immediately after the Big Bang quickly gained weight.