NASA Chandra: Gigantic Black Hole Jets Shines - Video

A powerful jet shooting from a supermassive black hole at the center of a distant galaxy shines in a newly released image and video tour.

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory gathered data that was used to create the new photo of the galaxy Centaurus A — which is located about 12 million light-years from Earth.

The space-based observatory collected the data from 1999 to 2012, but the space agency released the photo on Feb. 6. You also can take a full video tour of the Centarus A photo.

While the black hole jet is a prominent feature, the picture also shows what scientists think to be the leftovers of a collision between Centaurus A (Cen A for short) and a smaller galaxy millions of years ago.

The "dust lane" that wraps around the middle of Cen A could be the remains of the incorporated galaxy, NASA officials said in the video.

The galaxy Centaurus A shines in a photo taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory. 

Image uploaded Feb. 10, 2014. Credit: NASA/CXC/U.Birmingham/M.Burke et al.

"In this image, the lowest-energy X-rays Chandra detects are in red, while the medium-energy X-rays are green, and the highest-energy ones are blue," a NASA official said in the video explanation.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been observing Cen A since 1999, just after the space telescope came online. Scientists have found that point-like X-ray sources in Cen A fall into two groups.

The X-ray sources come from a system where either a black hole or neutron star is siphoning gas from a companion star, NASA officials said.

"These compact objects form by the collapse of massive stars, with black holes resulting from heavier stars than neutron stars," NASA officials said.

"The results suggested that nearly all of the compact objects [neutron stars or black holes] had masses that fell into two categories: either less than twice that of the sun, or more than five times as massive as the sun. These two groups correspond to neutron stars and black hole."

The Chandra observations are the first that show that the gap could occur in distant galaxies, space agency representatives said.

"If it turns out to be ubiquitous, it may mean that a special, rapid type of stellar collapse is required in some supernova explosions," NASA officials said.

Astronomers reveal contents of mysterious black hole jets

This is a model of the black hole system with the jets that have been found to contain atomic matter. 

Credit: J. Miller-Jones (ICRAR) using software created by R. Hynes.

An international team of astronomers has answered a long standing question about the enigmatic jets emitted by black holes, in research published today in prestigious journal Nature.

Jets are narrow beams of matter spat out at high speed from near a central object, like a black hole.

"Although they have been observed for decades, we're still not sure what they are made of, or what powers them," ESO astronomer Dr María Díaz Trigo, lead author of the study, said.

The team studied the radio waves and X-rays emitted by a small black hole a few times the mass of the Sun.

The black hole in question was known to be active, but the team's radio observations did not show any jets, and the X-ray spectrum didn't reveal anything unusual.

However, a few weeks later, the team took another look and this time saw radio emissions corresponding to the sudden appearance of these jets, and even more interestingly, lines had appeared in the X-ray spectrum – the tell-tale signature of ordinary atoms – around the black hole.

During the first observation the X-ray emission can be fully described by emission from a standard accretion disc. 

Credit: Riccardo Lanfranchi

"Intriguingly, we found the lines were not where they should be, but rather were shifted significantly," Dr James Miller Jones from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), who led the radio observations, said.

The same effect occurs when a siren from a vehicle changes pitch as it moves towards or away from us, as the sound wave is shortened or lengthened by the movement.

During the second observation the appearance of a jet is detected in radio emission and the X-ray spectrum requires an additional component attributed to coronal emission above the disc and three narrow emission lines indicating the presence of baryons. 

Credit: Riccardo Lanfranchi

"It led us to conclude the particles were being accelerated to fast speeds in the jets, one directed towards Earth, and the other one in the opposite direction," team member Dr Simone Migliari from the University of Barcelona said.

Dr Miller-Jones said this is the first strong evidence of such particles in jets from a typical small black hole.

"We've known for a long time that jets contain electrons, but haven't got an overall negative charge, so there must be something positively charged in them too," Dr Miller Jones said.

"Until now it wasn't clear whether the positive charge came from positrons, the antimatter 'opposite' of electrons, or positively charged atoms. Since our results found nickel and iron in these jets, we now know ordinary matter must be providing the positive charge."

Positively charged atoms are much heavier than the positrons astronomers thought might make up the jets, and therefore the jets can carry away far more energy from the black hole than previously confirmed.

What's more, astronomers aren't sure whether the jets are powered by the spin of the rotating black hole itself, or whether they are instead launched directly from the disk of matter that surrounds the black hole.

"Our results suggest it's more likely the disk is responsible for channelling the matter into the jets, and we are planning further observations to try and confirm this," Dr Miller-Jones said.

Using the X-ray data, the team also determined the jets were moving at 66% of the speed of light, or 198,000 km/s, the most accurate determination to date of the jet speed from a run-of-the-mill black hole that's a few times the mass of the Sun.

For their observations, the team used the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton satellite to observe X-ray emission from the black hole, as well as CSIRO's Australia Telescope Compact Array for the radio observations.

More information: Nature paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12672