Another close look at a black hole

Hot on the heels of the first ever direct image of a black hole, this one is also remarkable, although it seems to have gone largely unnoticed:

Astronomers used the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) to make the first direct image of a dusty, doughnut-shaped feature surrounding the supermassive black hole at the core of Cygnus A, of one of the most powerful radio galaxies in the Universe — a feature first postulated by theorists nearly four decades ago as an essential part of such objects.

public.nrao.edu...

Artist's impression:



The actual image:



Annotated:

“Cygnus A is the closest example of a powerful radio-emitting galaxy — 10 times closer than any other with comparably powerful radio emission. That proximity allowed us to find the torus in a high-resolution VLA image of the galaxy’s core,” said Rick Perley, also of NRAO.

The VLA observations directly revealed the gas in Cygnus A’s torus, which has a radius of nearly 900 light-years. Longstanding models for the torus suggest that the dust is in clouds embedded in the somewhat-clumpy gas.

“It’s really great to finally see direct evidence of something that we’ve long presumed should be there,” Carilli said. “To more accurately determine the shape and composition of this torus, we need to do further observing. For example, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) can observe at the wavelengths that will directly reveal the dust,” he added.

Press release video: www.youtube.com...


So there you go, more detailed views of what happens at the centre of galaxies that have supermassive black holes. I wonder if such a feature is very common for such galaxies, and whether M87's black hole has a similar torus.

We're entering an exciting new chapter in astronomy!

Looks like an infrared image of some dude riding a motorcycle taken from the back.

a reply to: wildespace

That is a crazy thing , it's another occasion where the Universe makes you stop , scratch your head and think WTF is that about ?

originally posted by: gortex
a reply to: wildespace

That is a crazy thing , it's another occasion where the Universe makes you stop , scratch your head and think WTF is that about ?

want to scratch your head?

the pic that just came out from M87 shows a black hole 6.6 billion times the mass of our sun.


Ton 618 has a mass 66 (sixty six) billion times our sun.

wrf

a reply to: TinySickTears

Black holes , you spend 9 months getting out of 1 ,the rest of your life trying to get back into 1 and when you die your best friends lower you head first into 1

And the sun is 99.8 % the mass of our universe

I find it remarkable that many stars and I believe some planets have some kind of torus model within their atmosphere? that thing seems a real planet and star grinder...

a reply to: BrianFlanders

Hhaaha complete with left turn hand signal!