'Black Hole Blowback' Could Impact Galactic Evolution : Big Pic

March 4, 2010 -- In the composite image above, bright X-rays generated by the hot cloud of speeding material can be seen, like a billowing flame. In a lot of ways this is an accurate description of what is going on; the supermassive black hole languishing in the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068 (50 million light years from Earth) is a galactic incinerator, blasting hot flames of plasma into space. Optical data from Hubble and radio wave data from the VLA is overlayed, showing the beautiful spiral of NGC 1068.

This is a black hole behemoth, twice the mass of the supermassive black hole that lives in the center of the Milky Way. The NGC 1068 supermassive black hole is incredibly active (it is one of the most active that we know of), devouring huge amounts of star matter, belching gas back out to a velocity of a million miles per hour. This monster is the destroyer of stars, ripping the center of the galaxy to shreds.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, scientists believe this violent beast is impacting the evolution of its host galaxy (through a mechanism known as "black hole blowback"). These sustained high-speed black hole winds are caused when stars are sucked close to the event horizon, but a portion of the shredded star mass doesn't fall deep into the bowels of the black hole. Some is left over and blasted away from the black hole at relativistic speeds.

Astronomers can see a huge amount of superheated matter being dumped up to 3,000 light years from the black hole. It's almost like an ultra-fast conveyor belt; stars are pulled into the black hole's accretion disk, destroyed and ejected back out into the galactic disk as a hot plasma. And with the help of the Chandra and Hubble space telescopes and the Very Large Array (VLA), this process becomes obvious.

-- Ian O'Neill, Discovery News.

Image credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/MIT/C.Canizares, D.Evans et al), Optical (NASA/STScI), Radio (NSF/NRAO/VLA). Source: Chandra X-ray Observatory.