Astronomers have produced the most comprehensive image of radio emission from the nearest actively feeding supermassive black hole to Earth.
The emission is powered by a central black hole in the galaxy Centaurus A, about 12 million light years away.
As the black hole feeds on in-falling gas, it ejects material at near light-speed, causing ‘radio bubbles’ to grow over hundreds of millions of years.
When viewed from Earth, the eruption from Centaurus A now extends eight degrees across the sky—the length of 16 full Moons laid side by side.
It was captured using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in outback Western Australia.
The research was published on December 22, 2021, in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Lead author Dr. Benjamin McKinley, from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said the image reveals spectacular new details of the radio emission from the galaxy.
“These radio waves come from material being sucked into the supermassive black hole in the middle of the galaxy,” he said.
“It forms a disc around the black hole, and as the matter gets ripped apart going close to the black hole, powerful jets form on either side of the disc, ejecting most of the material back out into space, to distances of probably more than a million light years.
“Previous radio observations could not handle the extreme brightness of the jets and details of the larger area surrounding the galaxy were distorted, but our new image overcomes these limitations.”
Actively Feeding Black Hole – Radio Galaxy Centaurus A
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