Yahoo News Nasa's Hubble telescope spots ‘weird' objects around black hole
Astronomers have used Nasa's Hubble Space Telescope to gain a unique view of a vast black hole that is powering a glowing ‘quasar’.
The new Hubble view of the area around the black hole has revealed a lot of ‘weird things’ around the black hole, the scientists say.
"We've got a few blobs of different sizes, and a mysterious L-shaped filamentary structure. This is all within 16,000 light-years of the black hole,” according to Bin Ren of the Côte d'Azur Observatory in Nice.
Scientists say it could help improve our understanding of why the blazing centres of galaxies, called quasars, are so bright.
What is a black hole?
A black hole is a dense object in space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it, not even light.
Black holes form when massive stars collapse, with huge black holes known as ‘supermassive black holes’ being found at the centre of galaxies.
Within a black hole, the ‘event horizon’ is the boundary around the black hole after which nothing can escape.
Things outside this area are still visible to telescopes, and this is what the Hubble telescope has been viewing.
Why are scientists studying this?
Scientists hoped to understand mysterious objects known as ‘quasars’.
A quasar is found at the centre of active galaxies and glow brightly, like a star.
At least 1 million quasars are scattered across the sky: they are incredibly bright, pouring out thousands of times the entire energy of stars in a galaxy.
For Hubble, staring into a quasar is like looking directly into a blinding car headlight and trying to see an ant crawling on the rim around it.
The quasar that is the subject of the new study is called 3C 273 was identified in 1963 by astronomer Maarten Schmidt - and was the first quasar ever spotted.
At a distance of 2.5 billion light-years, scientists deduced it was too far away to be a star.
It was more energetic than ever imagined, with a luminosity over 10 times brighter than the brightest giant elliptical galaxies.
This opened the door to an unexpected new puzzle in cosmology: What was powering this massive energy production?
Quasar 3C 273 is one of the closest to Earth at around 2.5 billion light-years away. If it was very close - say, a few tens of light-years away - it would appear as bright as the sun in the sky.
What did Hubble spot?
Scientists believe that quasars like the one being studied glow so brightly because they are powered by material falling into the black hole.
The researchers think that the “weird” objects could be small galaxies from which materials are being sucked into the supermassive black hole - powering the “lighthouse” quasar.
"Thanks to Hubble's observing power, we're opening a new gateway into understanding quasars. My colleagues are excited because they've never seen this much detail before,” Ren said.
Hubble's new sharp view of the galaxy has revealed that the environment surrounding quasars is far more complex than first suspected. The images suggested galactic collisions and mergers between quasars and companion galaxies, where debris cascades down onto supermassive black holes. This reignites the giant black holes that drive quasars.
Hubble's Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) can block light from central sources, not unlike how the moon blocks the Sun's glare during a total solar eclipse - and has allowed astronomers to look to a black hole eight times more closely than ever before.
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