A detailed image of a huge explosion from the nearest powered supermassive black hole that reaches a size of 16 moons, scientists have recorded.
The image, which records radioactive material being ejected from a black hole at almost the speed of light, shows giant plasma lobes spreading more than a million light-years away from the center of its galaxy, Centaur A.
Centaur A, about 12 million light-years from Earth, is the fifth brightest galaxy in space as seen from our planet.
At its center is the nearest known black hole that actively feeds our planet, a “monster” with a mass of 55 million Suns.
The black hole swallows gas, dust, and other material near it and then launches it like jets that spread far into intergalactic space, as shown in this image.
The galaxy itself occupies only a very small part in the center of the image. The dots in the background are not stars but other similar, but much more distant, galaxies. The dots in the foreground are stars in our own galaxy.
The image was taken with the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in the depths of Western Australia, a quiet location without radio interference and wide field of view.
The image consists of radio, optical and X-ray observations, said Benjamin McKinley, an astronomer at Curtin University in Australia and lead author of a new study describing the explosion.
space.com
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