Monster black hole burps out hot gas in bright 'H' shape (photos)

By Robert Lea published 1 day ago
The structure has revealed to astronomers that some black holes are picky eaters.



Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to make a map of the hot gas (pink) in and around the galaxy M84. (Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Princeton Univ/C. Bambic et al.; Optical: SDSS; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA/ESO; Image processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N.Wolk)


A hot pink letter "H" is carved into the blazing hot gas that surrounds a supermassive black hole that lurks at the heart of a massive galaxy. The structure is a staggering 40,000 light-years tall, making it about half the width of our entire galaxy, the Milky Way.

The "H" was revealed in an X-ray image of gas that surrounds the black hole in the elliptical galaxy Messier 84 (M84), located around 60 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo.

But there is more than aesthetic value to this inarguably stunning image. The observations of M84, taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) show that the jets may have an influence in shifting gas away from the black hole and disrupting its feeding, acting in opposition to the gravitational influence of the supermassive object. This has given astronomers the impression some black holes are picky eaters, as the jets blasted out from black holes like this one seem to restrict the amount of gas they can feed on from certain directions.

The gas in the image is captured by the gravitational influence of the supermassive black hole. While some of this material will fall to the surface of the black hole, which has a mass equivalent to around 1.5 billion times that of the sun, some will be blasted away as jets of particles. These jets can clear cavities in the hot gas surrounding the black hole.

More:
https://www.space.com/supermassive-black-hole-image-chandra-m84