Composite Image of Powerful Jets Spewing From Supermassive Black Hole

This image of the galaxy known as 4C+29.30 contains X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF's Very Large Array (pink).

CREDIT: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/A.Siemiginowska et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA

Supermassive black holes are thought to lie at the center of nearly every galaxy, sucking up dust and gas and other material that allows them to grow to enormous sizes.

A stunning composite image of a galaxy 850 million light-years from Earth shows the power of one of these cosmic monsters spewing out humongous jets.

Astronomers pieced together a picture of the galaxy known as 4C+29.30 using data from different telescopes, including X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope and radio waves from the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

The X-ray spectrum exposes the hot gas in this galaxy, with particularly bright spots at the center that represent million-degree gas pooling around the supermassive black hole, which is thought to be 100 million times heavier than our sun. Sometimes, as this matter falls in toward the black hole, it gets accelerated and hurled outward.

This triggers a flare-up in the two huge particle jets that radio data show to be racing at millions of miles per hour away from the black hole. Bright orbs at the end of the jets mark where extremely high energy electrons have crashed into clumps of material in the galaxy.

By both heating the gas in these clumps and dragging cool gas along for the ride, these jets sometimes deprive the supermassive black hole of its fuel supply, making it temporarily go hungry, researchers say.

2010 Eclipse, Composite Image

2010 Eclipse, Composite Image

A solar eclipse photo (gray and white) from the Williams College Expedition to Easter Island in the South Pacific (July 11, 2010) was embedded with an image of the Sun’s outer corona taken by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on the SOHO spacecraft and shown in red false color.

LASCO uses a disk to blot out the bright sun and the inner corona so that the faint outer corona can be monitored and studied.

Further, the dark silhouette of the moon was covered with an image of the Sun taken in extreme ultraviolet light at about the same time by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The composite brings out the correlation of structures in the inner and outer corona.

Credits: Williams College Eclipse Expedition -- Jay M. Pasachoff, Muzhou Lu, and Craig Malamut; SOHO’s LASCO image courtesy of NASA/ESA; solar disk image from NASA’s SDO; compositing by Steele Hill, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center