1/2/2022
The observations of the galactic cluster MS0735 located 2.6 billion light-years away could reveal new information about mysterious cavities or “radio bubbles” that surround the black hole and why they don’t simply collapse like a deflated balloon under pressure from their surroundings.
“We’re looking at one of the most energetic outbursts ever seen from a supermassive black hole,” research lead author and McGill University physicist Jack Orlowski-Scherer, said in a statement. “This is what happens when you feed a black hole and it violently burps out a giant amount of energy.”
These clusters are also home to atmospheres that fill the space between galaxies with incredibly hot gas or plasma at temperatures as great as around 90 million degrees Fahrenheit (50 million degrees Celsius).
Though this plasma can cool over time and allow cold dense gas to form and eventually collapse to birth new stars, feeding black holes can work against this process.Â
Supermassive black holes can reheat this gas through violent outbursts of material. These outflows occur when some of this matter isn’t swallowed by the black hole but is instead dragged to its poles from where it is blasted out at near the speed of light.
This process, known as “feedback,” quenches the formation of new stars with the jets of material also carving out cavities in surrounding gas.
As this gas is pushed away from the center of galactic clusters it is replaced by bubbles that emit radio waves.
The shifting of these huge volumes of gas requires a massive amount of energy in turn and astronomers have been endeavoring to understand where this energy comes from in addition to discovering what is left behind in these evacuated cavities.
To learn more about such gas bubbles in galactic clusters and the processes that create them the team of astronomers including Orlowski-Scherer trained the Green Bank Telescope’s MUSTANG-2 receiver on the cluster MS0735. The Green Bank Telescope observations were complemented by X-ray data collected previously from MS0735 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Full Link ( Msn ) Here
