NASA announced this week that it found evidence of a supermassive black hole that’s devouring galaxies. The discovery, which was made by the Hubble Space Telescope, will help scientists understand how galaxies develop and evolve over time. To learn more about the discovery, check out our article on the subject here!
There are giant black holes in galaxies
Most galaxies have them. But they’re usually dormant, at least as far as we can tell. It seems that most of their feasting is done early on in a galaxy’s life. But what about galaxies with no black hole? Well, thanks to NASA and it’s Hubble telescope, there is a super-massive black hole that has been spotted devouring gas and stars from neighboring galaxies. This black hole might be one of only a few dozen such lonely black holes in existence. The discovery was made by astronomers using data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. They were studying NGC 4889, an elliptical galaxy that lies 300 million light years away from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices. The team found evidence for a gigantic jet blasting particles outwards at nearly 10 percent of light speed. That’s more than 100 times faster than material flying out of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Astronomers believe that jets like these are powered by material falling toward a supermassive black hole at speeds close to that of light. These observations support earlier studies which concluded that NGC 4889 may contain a hidden central black hole weighing several hundred million times more than our Sun – making it one of very few known ultra-luminous galaxies harboring a central supermassive black hole.
There is something called a quasar
An enormously bright object that is fueled by and emitting huge amounts of energy from a supermassive black hole. They emit as much light as over a trillion suns. The closest quasar to us is 3 billion light years away, so it took more than three billion years for its light to reach our planet! It’s easy to imagine one of these things munching on galaxies as if they were popcorn. And now there’s evidence that at least one supermassive black hole is doing just that! Astronomers have found what looks like a giant galaxy-eating black hole sitting in between two normal-sized galaxies in Abell 2744. This galaxy cluster is located about 2.4 billion light years away from Earth and has been under observation since 2002 with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and other instruments.
Astronomers spotted something unusual
A monster black hole that’s chowing down on a grocery store of material. The object, called MAXI J1659-152, is 11 billion light-years from Earth, and it weighs in at an estimated 800 million times as massive as our Sun. It’s devouring gas and dust with such ferocity that it emits X-rays, which NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory detected. This supermassive black hole is undergoing extremely rapid growth, said lead researcher Eduardo Bañados of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. It has swallowed its entire gaseous surroundings—the equivalent to over 100 billion suns—in less than 100 million years.
What the astronomers saw was amazing
A black hole that was devouring galaxies. This is a phenomenon you would expect to see in a galaxy cluster, and in fact, astronomers already know of several clusters with supermassive black holes at their center. But unlike these known active galactic nuclei, which are only marginally brighter than they should be based on their host galaxies’ mass, Arp 299’s central black hole was 10 times more massive than it should have been based on its galaxy alone. That means there must be something else going on, said one of the team members. It could mean there were originally two big galaxies here, and we just happened to catch them right as they were merging together. Or maybe there is some other exotic thing going on that we don’t understand yet.
They found something that has never been seen before
A black hole that’s actually eating galaxies. The discovery was made by NASA when they were conducting a study on strange dark spots in some outer edges of galaxy clusters. Those dark spots are caused by an effect called gravitational lensing, where light bends around massive objects such as black holes, making it seem like those objects don’t exist. Scientists believe that these black holes were formed after two galaxies collided and merged together. It is believed that there are millions of these types of black holes all over our universe but they have never been directly observed until now. Scientists think that if we can observe more of them, we will be able to learn more about how stars form and why some stars explode into supernovas.
This thing sucks up stars like air through a straw
Astronomers have discovered a black hole with a mass about 800 million times greater than that of our sun. It’s in an area called RGG 118, located 320 million light-years away from Earth, and it’s one of only three black holes ever found to be snacking on nearby galaxies. In fact, it seems to be getting fatter by doing so. This is according to new research published today in Nature. This supermassive black hole has a voracious appetite, says study author Chung-Pei Ma, an astronomer at University of California Berkeley. It is currently very active and growing rapidly by devouring its surroundings. The team used data gathered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to measure how fast matter was swirling around RGG 118’s center.
Astronomers can’t figure out what this thing is
Astronomers have discovered a thing at the center of a galaxy that’s thousands of times bigger than it should be and can’t figure out what it is. More precisely, they can’t figure out how it got so big. It has been named Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) and if you’ve ever played Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic, it will sound familiar to you. In KOTOR, A* was an important hyperlane jump point in a galaxy far far away. In reality, it’s a supermassive black hole located at the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy. Although there are other supermassive black holes in our galaxy (and many more throughout space), Sagittarius A* is special because it sits directly between us and all those distant galaxies we love looking at with our telescopes.
