Explosive energy: Black hole jets captured in all their glory in most detailed image yet



Giant black holes in the centre of galaxies are now spinning faster than at any time in the history of the universe, scientists also claimed today



Astonishingly beautiful, this is the most detailed image of particle jets erupting from a super-massive black hole yet captured.

It shows a region in the nearby galaxy of Centaurus A that is just under 4.2 light-years across - less than the distance between our sun and the nearest star.

Radio-emitting features as small as 15 light-days can be seen, making this the highest-resolution view of galactic jets ever made.

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Majestic power: Merging X-ray data (blue) from Nasa's Chandra X-ray Observatory with microwave (orange) and visible images reveals the jets and radio-emitting lobes emanating from Centaurus A's central black hole

GIANT BLACK HOLES SPINNING 'FASTER THAN EVER BEFORE'

The giant black holes in the centre of galaxies are on average spinning faster than at any time in the history of the universe, according to British astronomers.



Dr Alejo Martinez-Sansigre, of the University of Portsmouth, and Professor Steve Rawlings, of the University of Oxford, made the discovery by using radio, optical and X-ray data.

They compared theoretical models of spinning black holes and found their data observations can explain the population of super-massive black holes with jets.

Using the radio data, they were able to sample the population of black holes, deducing the spread of the power of the jets.

By estimating how they acquire material - the accretion process - the researchers could then infer how quickly these objects are spinning.

The observations also give information on how the spins of super-massive black holes have evolved.

In the past, when the universe was half its the present size, practically all of the super-massive black holes had very low spins, whereas nowadays a fraction of them have very high spins.

So on average, super-massive black holes are spinning faster than ever before.

The study suggests that super-massive black holes that grow by swallowing matter will barely spin, while those that merge with other black holes will be left spinning rapidly.

The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Lead researcher Cornelia Mueller, from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, said: 'These jets arise as in-falling matter approaches the black hole, but we don't yet know the details of how they form and maintain themselves.'

The image was taken using radio telescopes located throughout the southern hemisphere.



Centaurus A contains a super-massive black hole weighing 55million times the sun's mass.

Also known as NGC 5128, it is located about 12million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus and is one of the first celestial radio sources identified with a galaxy.

Seen in radio waves, Centaurus A is one of the biggest and brightest objects in the sky, nearly 20 times the apparent size of a full moon.

This is because the visible galaxy lies nestled between a pair of giant radio-emitting lobes, each nearly a million light-years long.

These lobes are filled with matter streaming from particle jets near the galaxy's central black hole.

Astronomers estimate that matter near the base of these jets races outwards at about a third the speed of light.

Using an intercontinental array of nine radio telescopes, researchers for the Tanami project - Tracking Active Galactic Nuclei with Austral Milliarcsecond Interferometry - were able to effectively zoom into the galaxy's innermost realm.

Roopesh Ojha, from Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, said: 'A dvanced computer techniques allow us to combine data from the individual telescopes to yield images with the sharpness of a single giant telescope, one nearly as large as Earth itself.'

The enormous energy output of galaxies like Centaurus A comes from gas falling toward a black hole weighing millions of times the sun's mass.

Through processes not fully understood, some of this in-falling matter is ejected in opposing jets at a substantial fraction of the speed of light. Detailed views of the jet's structure will help astronomers determine how they form.

Close to the Milky Way: Galaxy NGC 5128 - host of the Centaurus A radio source and located 12million light-years away - as it appears in visible light The jets strongly interact with surrounding gas, at times possibly changing a galaxy's rate of star formation. Jets play an important but poorly understood role in the formation and evolution of galaxies. Nasa's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has detected a lot of higher-energy radiation from Centaurus A's central region. Researcher Matthias Kadler, of the University of Wuerzburg in Germany, said: This radiation is billions of times more energetic than the radio waves we detect, and exactly where it originates remains a mystery. 'With Tanami, we hope to probe the galaxy's innermost depths to find out.' The study appears in journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The giant elliptical galaxy NGC 5128 (left) is the radio source known as Centaurus A. Vast radio-emitting lobes (shown as orange in this optical/radio composite) extend nearly a million light-years from the galaxy