The joint NASA and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission XRISM has discovered a monster black hole awakening in a distant “starburst” galaxy.
The research is revolutionary for the science of black holes, because it represents the first observation of the precise stage at which “wind” from a black hole begin to form a whole galaxy.
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The team found that these black hole balls carried with them energy 100 times greater than that of slower molecular winds spreading through the distant galaxy, which is the result of a recent merger and is currently in the midst of intense star formation.
The energetic nature of these outflows shows that they are more than capable of redirecting the evolution of this galaxy.
Supermassive black holes and galaxies grow together
when it was created via a merger between two parent galaxies. This collision produced an enormous amount of gas and dust, which triggered an intense bout of star formation, referred to as a starburst.
However, much of this gas flows towards the heart of the galaxy and its central supermassive black hole, gathering around it in a flattened swirling cloud called an “accretion disk”. As the accretion disk gradually feeds the black hole, the enormous gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole is estimated to be 420 million times more massive than the sungenerates powerful tidal forces in the accretion disk, causing it to glow brightly.
This region is referred to as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), and its bright emission is seen on Earth as one quasars.
Not all matter in the accretion disk is fed to the supermassive black hole. Something is channeled to the black hole’s poles, from where it is blasted out as powerful jets. Other matter is blown away by intense black hole winds.
These factors can push gas and dust away from the AGN, starving the black hole and away from the host galaxy as a whole. This has the effect of “killing” the galaxy by cutting off star formation. This leads to a quiescent phase in the galaxy, now with a fixed elliptical shape, without star formation, and with a dormant black hole.
IRAS 05189-2524 provides a unique opportunity for researchers to study this process, as it is in the late stages of merging, with an active starburst ongoing and an active supermassive black hole in an AGN.
The researchers not only studied these black hole balls in great detail, but also found that this supermassive black hole is still eating voraciously. In fact, this violent consumption of matter is close to the theoretical limit for such a black hole. The team expects that the outflow of matter from this black hole will intensify, eventually killing star formation in this galaxy.
The researchers hope to study IRAS 05189-2524 further with XRISM, as well as collect observations with the upcoming NewAthena spacecraftset to be the largest X-ray observatory ever built.
The new results will soon appear in a special issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
