"For decades, astronomers have known that supermassive black holes lurk at the hearts of essentially all large galaxies, occasionally feasting on infalling material and burping out powerful jets. But what's been less clear is how, exactly, this activity shapes their surrounding galaxies. Now researchers have found a crucial piece of this galactic puzzle by observing a supermassive black hole shooting out a wobbling jet in the galaxy VV 340A, some 450 million light-years from Earth."
"Conventionally, there are two modes of gas outflows driven by supermassive black holes in galaxies, says Justin Kader, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Irvine and first author of an associated paper published in Science. In the first so-called radiative mode, a white-hot, incandescent accretion disk of infalling matter forms around a rapidly feeding supermassive black hole, heating the nearby gas. This heated gas then expands and pushes the cooler gas outward."
A supermassive black hole in galaxy VV 340A, about 450 million light-years away, launches a wobbling jet that acts like a cosmic-scale snowplow, pushing away gas that would otherwise fuel new stars. Supermassive black holes drive two outflow modes: radiative mode, where a white-hot accretion disk heats nearby gas causing wide-angle bicone outflows; and jet-driven mode, where polar jets kinetically push gas outward and can compress clouds to trigger star formation. In VV 340A the wobbling jet removes star-forming gas rather than compressing it, thereby suppressing the galaxy's ability to form new stars.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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