Giant Black Hole and Speeding Jets Captured in New NASA Image

Far from Earth, a massive black hole resides in the center of a galaxy known as 4C+29.30. There, it spews two speeding jets of particles into space. Now, astronomers have captured this black hole and its jets in a spectacular image that was taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope and the NSF's Very Large Array.

The latest image is actually a composite, formed from the data of different instruments. Within it, you can see the bright, million-degree gas around the black hole. The radio emission that the instruments picked up actually comes from two jets of particles that are speeding millions of miles per hour away from the black hole.  While some of the gas may eventually be consumed by the black hole, the magnetized whirlpool of gas near it could also trigger more output to this radio jet.

The black hole itself is located about 850 million light years from Earth--and it's huge. It's estimated to be about 100 million times the mass of our sun. The latest image of it and its jets, though, could teach researchers a bit more about how to capture this type of far off phenomenon.

Most of the low-energy X-rays from the vicinity of the black hole are absorbed by dust and gas--probably in the shape of a giant doughnut around the black hole. This doughnut, known as a torus, blocks all the optical light produced near the black hole, so astronomers refer to this type of source as a hidden or buried black hole. The optical light seen in the image is actually from the stars in the galaxy.

The bright spots in X-ray and radio emission on the outer edges of the galaxy near the ends of the jets are actually caused by extremely high energy electrons following curved paths along magnetic field lines. They show where a jet generated by the black hole has plowed into clumps of material in the galaxy.

Much of the energy of the jet actually goes into heating the gas in these dumps, while some of it goes into dragging cool gas along the direction of the jet. Both the heating and dragging can limit the fuel supply for this black hole, leading to temporary starvation and stopping its growth.

The recent findings about this image were reporting in two different papers, including one published in The Astrophysical Journal and another one published in the same journal.

Want to see more images? You can check them out here.