Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope have imaged a quasar at the heart of a distant galaxy spewing out massive amounts of radiation powered by a supermassive black hole.
These extremely powerful events are often described as the prime movers of active galaxies and can emit more light than others a star in their house galaxy amount. However, scientists still do not fully understand the physics that drive their cataclysmic activity.
This is just illustrated quasar Lurking in the heart of the galaxy NRAO 530 and has been captured by Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), famous for its production The first image of a black hole 2019. The EHT Collaboration Team follows up on this massive photo Black hole In the heart of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) by extension Curve image A* (Sgr A*), a supermassive black hole in the Milky Way, in May 2022.
Related: A strange ‘unidentified structure’ has been found in the vicinity of a nearby quasar
However, the recently published observations are special in that they were made in April 2017, before the EHT spotted the black hole M87 or Grade A*because the space telescope has calibrated NRAO 530 in preparation for viewing the black hole at the heart of our galaxy.
said EHT Collaboration Team member and Planck Institute researcher for radio astronomy Masek Wilgus V statement (Opens in a new tab). “The light we see has been traveling towards Earth for 7.5 billion years through the expanding universe, but with the power of the EHT we are seeing details of the source structure on scales as small as a light year.”
How black holes illuminate their home in the galaxy
Black holes themselves do not emit light but actually capture light behind a one-way surface called a event horizonso it might seem odd that they could trigger such a luminous phenomenon.
Quasars are powerful sources of radiation due to the strong gravitational influence of their central black holes, which can be millions or even billions of times more massive than black holes. sun, accelerating the material to near the speed of light and heating it. This causes the quasar to be very bright, but it is not the only source of radiation from quasars.
This black hole voraciously feeds on the matter that surrounds it, but not all of that material makes it past the event horizon. The quasar’s magnetic field also guides particles to the component poles of the supermassive black hole. Here the particles collimate in a thin, bright jet that explodes at nearly the speed of light. The emission of these quasars can reach hundreds of thousands light years. How the quasar’s magnetic field forms this emission is shrouded in mystery.
The quasar at the core of NRAO 530 is also classified as a Blazarwhich is a type of quasar that is oriented in such a way that the beams that explode from it are aimed directly at Earth.
The EHT saw these quasars in both polarized and non-polarized light, allowing researchers to investigate the structure of magnetic fields near the black hole and the deepest parts of the jet. This reveals a bright feature located at the southern end of the jet associated with the core from which the jet started.
This core contains a substructure that can only be deconvolved and resolved at short wavelengths, its brightness indicating that the energy of the jet is dominated by a magnetic field.
The plane also has two features that are oriented at right angles and parallel to the plane itself. This showed the team that the plane’s magnetic field has a spiral structure.
“The external features have a high degree of linear polarization, indicating a well-ordered magnetic field,” said Svetlana Jorstad, member of the EHT collaboration and senior scientist at Boston University, in the release.
The EHT collaboration will continue to study quasars so they can better understand how the behavior of the deep jets changes and relates to the production of high-energy photons over time.
This research is documented in a research paper published in Astrophysics Journal. (Opens in a new tab)
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