Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Hubble spots unexpected disc around supermassive black hole

Georgina Torbet
By
Artist’s impression of the peculiar thin disc of material circling a supermassive black hole at the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, located 130 million light-years away. ESA/Hubble, M. Kornmesser

Hubble has discovered something odd: A disc of material around a supermassive black hole which was thought to be starving. The black hole in question lies at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 3147, which is 130 million light-years away from Earth.

Astronomers were surprised to find the disc as they had thought that the black holes in a galaxy like this would be dying, as they usually do not capture enough dust and gas through their gravity to keep being regularly fed. But the disc of material around this black hole looks like what is seen in very active galaxies. Using computer models, the team investigated what happens when galaxies are active but give off relatively little light, predicting that a disc of material would be present when lots of gas is in the area. This process emits a lot of light, forming a quasar.

Recommended Videos

“The type of disc we see is a scaled-down quasar that we did not expect to exist,” the study’s first author, Stefano Bianchi, of Università degli Studi Roma Tre in Italy, explained in a statement. “It’s the same type of disc we see in objects that are 1,000 or even 100,000 times more luminous. The predictions of current models for very faint active galaxies clearly failed.”

Related

Another interesting feature about the disc of material is that it demonstrates the theory of relativity. The disc is deep in the gravity field of the black hole, so much so that the strong gravitational forces actually affect the light waves given off. “This is an intriguing peek at a disc very close to a black hole, so close that the velocities and the intensity of the gravitational pull are affecting how we see the photons of light,” Bianchi explained. “We’ve never seen the effects of both general and special relativity in visible light with this much clarity,” team member Marco Chiaberge said in the statement.

To see the matter in the disc, the team used Hubble’s Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, a combined camera and spectrograph, which splits light into different wavelengths to gather highly precise information about an object’s speed and temperature.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
Monster black hole gives off epic radio emissions as it chows down on gas
Centaurus A is a giant elliptical active galaxy 12 million light-years away. At its heart lies a black hole with a mass of 55 million suns. This image shows the galaxy at radio wavelengths, revealing vast lobes of plasma that reach far beyond the visible galaxy, which occupies only a small patch at the centre of the image. The dots in the background are not stars, but radio galaxies much like Centaurus A, at far greater distances.

Black holes are counter-intuitive things. They have such strong gravity that they absorb everything that comes close to them, even light, but they can still glow brightly in certain wavelengths due to emissions being given off at their event horizons. Astronomers have captured incredible emissions from a monster black hole with a mass equivalent to 55 million suns, which is giving off radio eruptions large enough to cover a portion of the sky the length of 16 moons.

The radio emissions are coming from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Centaurus A, located 12 million light-years away, which is gobbling down gas. As the black hole consumes this gas it ejects material at extremely high speeds which gives rise to "radio bubbles" that grow and reach out into space.

Read more
Hubble captures the site of an epic supernova, spotted by amateur astronomers
In this image, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures a side-on view of NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy roughly 57 million light-years from the Milky Way in the constellation Centaurus. In 2014 the light from a supernova explosion in NGC 3568 reached Earth – a sudden flare of light caused by the titanic explosion accompanying the death of a massive star.

The eyes of the astronomy community are firmly on one event this week: The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, the brand-new space observatory from NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, which will be the world's most powerful space telescope and the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. But that launch doesn't mean that Hubble will be going away, as the older telescope will continue to be used to capture beautiful images of space in the visible light spectrum, while James Webb will focus primarily on capturing data in the infrared wavelength.

This week's image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of the striking visuals it is still possible to capture with this 30-year-old technology. It shows the galaxy NGC 3568, a barred spiral galaxy (like our Milky Way) which is located around 57 million light-years away in the constellation of Centaurus.

Read more
Research confirms enormous mass of supermassive black hole at center of galaxy
Illustration of the black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way.

A new study reveals the most precise information yet about the mass of the enormous black hole at the center of our galaxy. Like most galaxies, the Milky Way has a supermassive black hole at its heart, and the recent research shows more about the mass of this monster called Sagittarius A*or Sgr A* for short.

Illustration of the black hole Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way. International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/(Spaceengine) Acknowledgement: M. Zamani (NSF's NOIRLab)

Read more