Supermassive black holes can be surprisingly delicate eaters, astronomers find
By Daisy Dobrijevic - Staff Writer, All About Space Magazine about 5 hours ago
The supermassive black hole's eating habits were captured in a striking image.
The feeding process at the center of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy NGC 1566. (Image credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO))
How do you feed an all-consuming, cosmic glutton that is a black hole? With long, wispy filaments of dust, according to researchers who have stared into the very belly of the beast.
Scientists imaged this particular picnic at the heart of a galaxy called NGC 1566, using the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.
"This group of telescopes has given us a completely new perspective of a supermassive black hole, thanks to the imaging at high angular resolution and the panoramic visualization of its surroundings, because it lets us follow the disappearance of the dust filaments as they fall into the black hole," Almudena Prieto, lead author of the new study and an astronomer at Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the Canary Islands, said in a statement.
NGC 1566 is located approximately 40 million light-years from Earth and boasts a powerful supermassive black hole at its center. Scientists combined images captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, VLT and ALMA, to capture a direct snapshot of this black hole snacking.
More:
https://www.space.com/supermassive-black-hole-eating-habits-revealed
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