A black hole is swallowing up so much matter that its surroundings (a quasar) would shine just as brightly as the Sun in Earth’s sky if it were several dozen light years away from us instead of several billion.
The surroundings of this quasar, called 3C 273, were recently observed by the Hubble Space Telescope of the American and European space agencies (NASA and ESA).And the images obtained were analyzed by Bin Ren’s team, from the University of the Côte d’Azur in France.
Near 3C 273, at a distance of up to 16,000 light-years from its center, strange structures can be seen in the images. There are filaments, lobes and a particularly mysterious “L”-shaped structure. Everything indicates that they are the result of small galaxies that fell into the black hole at the center of 3C 273 and were torn apart and devoured by it.
In the sky, quasars look like stars (hence the name quasar, which means “quasi-stellar object”). The quasar in the new study, 3C 273, was identified in 1963 by astronomer Maarten Schmidt as the first quasar. At a distance of 2.5 billion light years from Earth, it was too far away to be a true star. Even then it was clear that the object had to possess much more energy than any previously known star to reach that brightness more than 10 times greater than that of the brightest giant elliptical galaxies.
That finding opened the door to a new and unexpected puzzle in cosmology: what source did that colossal amount of energy come from? Over time, it was steadfast that it came from material in the process of being swallowed up by a black hole.
The Hubble Space Telescope’s STIS spectrograph can act as a coronagraph to block light from a central glare source to help you see your surroundings better, just as the Moon blocks the Sun’s glare during a total solar eclipse. Hubble’s coronagraph allowed astronomers to look at the black hole eight times closer than previously achieved.
Image of the nucleus of quasar 3C 273 taken by the hubble Space Telescope. An instrument on Hubble acts as a coronagraph because it can block the glow coming from the immediate vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar. This allows astronomers to see unprecedented details near the black hole, such as strange filaments and lobes, as well as a mysterious L-shaped structure. This appears to be the result of the process of small galaxies falling towards the black hole. (Photo: NASA, ESA, Bin ren (Université Côte d’Azur / CNRS) / John Bahcall (IAS). Image processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
The authors of the study managed to peer into the 300,000 light-year-long jet of extragalactic material that passes through space at almost the speed of light. By comparing old images captured by STIS with images also captured by STIS but 22 years later, Ren’s team was able to determine, among other things, that the jet moves faster when it is farther from the monstrous black hole. (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)