NASA and ESA telescopes trace ultra-strong winds blowing from black holes

 

Excerpt from thespacereporter.com


According to a NASA statement,

telescopes have revealed for the first time that powerful winds emanate

from black holes in all directions. These winds are so tremendous that

they can actually work to hamper the formation of new stars in the host

galaxy.

The two telescopes that were employed by the agency, NASA’s Nuclear

Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and ESA’s XMM-Newton, focused on

PDS 456, a quasar, an extremely bright type of black hole, over 2

billion light-years away. The results were then analyzed by a team led

by Emanuele Nardini of Keele University in the UK.

The two telescopes studied the quasar PDS 456 at five different times

throughout 2013 and 2014. By combining low-energy X-ray observations

from XMM-Newton with high-energy X-ray observations from NuSTAR, Nardini

and team were able to trace iron dispersed by the quasar’s winds. These

data demonstrated that the winds blow outwards from the black hole in a

spherical front.

Having ascertained the structure of the quasar winds, the team was

then able to calculate the strength of the winds. So strong are the

quasar winds that they push huge quantities of matter before them,

dispersing it outwards through the host galaxy and preventing it from

eventually coalescing to generate new stars. In an earlier period of the

universe’s history, about 10 billion years ago, supermassive black

holes were more abundant and their terrible winds probably had a hand in

shaping the current shapes of galaxies.

“For an astronomer, studying PDS 456 is like a paleontologist being

given a living dinosaur to study,” said co-author Daniel Stern of NASA’s

Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We are able to investigate the physics of

these important systems with a level of detail not possible for those

found at more typical distances, during the ‘Age of Quasars.’”

Source Article from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/AscensionEarth2012/~3/YKdmsbJwL0w/nasa-and-esa-telescopes-trace-ultra.html

[ Add Comment ]

NASA and ESA telescopes trace ultra-strong winds blowing from black holes