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They believe that almost every large galaxy the environment they are supermassive a black hole at its core, it is a mass ranging from millions to billions of times the sun.
Black holes grow and destroy matter around them, but their cores also emit powerful jets of energy. These jets heat the surrounding atmosphere, delaying the formation of new stars and affecting the size of the galaxy as a whole.
This has been giving researchers an idea. As the black hole emits jets and heats the surrounding gas, the gas that would have been burned by the black hole—that is, its energy source—is scattered far and wide. And yet, why do black holes never “run out of fuel” and instead continue to grow?
In order to explain this mystery, researchers decided to hypothesize that: Over time, the heated gas cools in the air and forms small filament-like particles. These particles fall back into the black hole.
A recently published study has brought researchers closer to confirming this hypothesis. An international team led by Julie Hlavacek-Larrondo, a professor at the University of Montreal, observed the central galaxy NGC 4696 in the Centaurus Cluster and showed connection between such a fiber and its central black hole.
“Cosmic Recycling System” of Heat and Cold
NGC 4696 is about 145 million light-years from Earth. It has been the subject of much research in the past, including the discovery of an S-shaped circular structure around the central black hole.
During this study, the team observed the central region of the galaxy for about eight hours using telescopes James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec). The observations achieved the best possible resolution to distinguish structures about 30 light-years away. To put this in perspective, if a galaxy 300,000 light-years across were measured to be the size of a football field, it would be equivalent to spotting a single marble placed in that spot from 50 kilometers away.
The flow of the gas showed that the S-shaped spiral is a rotating disk of gas that surrounds the black hole. The disk is about 800 inches across, and the gas pulled by the black hole’s gravity spins at several hundred kilometers per second. A speed difference of about 600 kilometers per second was measured between some parts of the disk.
The findings also showed that the filaments—made from condensed air—flow along the edge of the disk. Air flows along these filaments, accumulates in the disk, and is eventually delivered to the black hole as “fuel.” For the first time, the whole process has been shown directly.
“What JWST is revealing is that black holes can be the regenerator of the universe,” he says Hlavacek-Larrondo. It emits a large amount of energy that heats up the space it’s in, but that gas later cools into tiny particles that fall back into the black hole.
Black Holes Control the Growth of Galaxies
In addition to their observations, the research team conducted computer experiments, which led them to the following conclusions:
When a gas stream falls to a black hole, the stretched magnetic field acts like a string, causing the gas to become unstable. As a result, the gas falls into the disk instead of being dispersed.
