Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Supermassive Black Hole Shows Strange Gas Movements

Supermassive Black Hole Shows Strange Gas Movements:

A Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 5548. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin

A Hubble Space Telescope image of NGC 5548. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin
Sometimes it takes a second look — or even more — at an astronomical object to understand what’s going on. This is what happened after astronomers obtained this image of NGC 5548 using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013. While crunching the data, they saw some gas moving around the galaxy in a way that they did not understand.

From the supermassive black hole embedded in the galaxy’s heart, the researchers detected gas moving outward quite quickly — blocking about 90% of the X-rays being emitted from the black hole, a common feature of objects of this type. So, astronomers marshalled a bunch of telescopes to figure out the answer.

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Read the rest of Supermassive Black Hole Shows Strange Gas Movements (288 words)


© Elizabeth Howell for Universe Today, 2014. |
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