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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Team gets rare glimpse at how black holes grow
"Our main interest is to learn how supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are fueled, so that they grow to the enormous million to billion solar mass objects we see today," says Sebastian Hoenig, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara, who was was part a team to observe how black holes in the center of galaxies grow. Above, an artist’s view of a dust torus surrounding the accretion disk and the central black hole in active galactic nuclei. (Credit: NASA E/PO - Sonoma State University, Aurore Simonnet)
UC SANTA BARBARA (US) — Scientists have made the most detailed observation of a supermassive black hole’s accretion phase.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
The international team used a unique method to observe the black hole—which is in the center of a galaxy tens of millions of light years away—combining the light of three powerful infrared telescopes.
The resulting data has yielded direct confirmation of how mass accretes onto black holes in centers of galaxies. The team reports findings in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“This three-telescope interferometry is a major milestone toward directly imaging the growth phase of supermassive black holes,” says Sebastian Hoenig, a postdoctoral researcher at the physics department of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of the astrophysicists who utilized this technique to observe the highly luminescent active galactic nucleus (AGN) at the center of galaxy NGC 3783. The observation was led by Gerd Weigelt, a director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany.
By simultaneously combining the light from three 8-meter telescopes at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile (above), the research team was able to achieve the angular resolution needed to observe the black hole’s hot dust ring. (Credit: Sebastian Hoenig)
Hoenig described their findings as a ring of hot dust that marks the transition from a more-distant mixture of gas and dust in a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) structure, to a gaseous disk closer to the black hole. The dusty part, he says, is interesting because it dominates the infrared emission of active galactic nuclei and can be easily observed.
However, observing the ring of hot dust in NGC 3783 was a challenge for the astrophysicists. Not only is the ring distant and faint, but the ability of individual infrared telescopes to resolve distances between actively accreting objects is also highly limited.
Even the largest optical/infrared telescopes in the world, the Keck telescopes, were not powerful enough, though they can show objects in the infrared comparable to about the size of a football field at the distance of the moon.
“In order to spatially resolve the accretion process onto supermassive black holes in nearby galaxies, we have to be at least a factor of ten better,” says Hoenig. To achieve that angular resolution in a single telescope, it would have to be 130 meters in diameter.
However, by using the AMBER interferometry instrument to simultaneously combine the light from three 8-meter telescopes at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the research team was able to achieve the angular resolution needed to observe the hot dust ring. The Paranal Observatory is operated by the European Southern Observatories (ESO).
The combination of the light from the three telescopes was no small feat, as the tiny differences in the arrival of light in the individual telescopes have to undergo constant correction with an accuracy of a few micrometers—roughly ten times smaller than the thickness of a hair, according to Hoenig.
“The ESO VLTI provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of active galactic nuclei,” says lead researcher Weigelt. “It allows us to study fascinating physical processes with unprecedented resolution over a wide range of infrared wavelengths. This is needed to derive physical properties of these sources.”
Up next for the research team, which also includes astrophysicists from the universities of Florence, Grenoble, and Nice, will be the continued accumulation of information from additional observations toward a highly detailed image of the active galactic nucleus at galaxy NGC 3783.
“Our main interest is to learn how supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies are fueled, so that they grow to the enormous million to billion solar mass objects we see today,” says Hoenig.
More news from UC Santa Barbara: www.ucsb.edu/news-topics
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DR. ARLETT MALVO
SALVATION OF THE BLACK MALES
Please take a hour of your time and listen to this C.D. on the issues of the Black males. The major problem is an over flow of the 60’s and we have to do to change our behavior. This might be something that your community might want to hear.
The program will be broadcasted on an Internet Radio Station “Sound World Radio, Loudcaster” out of Waco Texas. 14th of July 2012, at 11am Texas (Central) time.
DR. Arlett Malvo