Scientists increasingly believe black holes are key to the evolution of galaxies and instrumental in setting up the conditions for life itself to emerge. That doesn’t mean these cosmic behemoths are always benevolent.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) this week reported that a galaxy called W2246-0526 – recently named the most luminous galaxy viewable by astronomers – has a major black hole problem. To wit, it seems that the “growing supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy” is stirring up gas and turbulence across W2246-0526, wreaking havoc on the star systems within.
“It is like a pot of boiling water being heated up by a nuclear reactor in the center,” NASA quoted Tanio Diaz-Santos of the Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile as saying.
Diaz-Santos is the lead author of a new study about W2246-0526 published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, which is based on findings by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope (pictured below).
The galaxy under observation is 12.4 billion light-years from Earth and it’s very old, according to NASA, forming around 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Even as W2246-0526 is “tearing itself apart,” it’s also “expelling tremendously turbulent gas,” said Diaz-Santos’s colleague Roberto Assef, an astronomer and leader of the observing team at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.
“The momentum and energy of the particles of light deposited in the gas are so great that they are pushing the gas out in all directions,” Assef was quoted as saying by NASA.
The expulsion of turbulent gas, believed to be driven by the supermassive black hole at the center of W2246-0526, is “a phenomenon never seen before in an object of this kind,” NASA reported.
“The ‘boiling’ gas is not in the accretion disk. The whole galaxy is being disturbed,” said Peter Eisenhardt, project scientist for WISE at JPL in Pasadena, Calif. Astronomers have previously observed gaseous turbulence believed to be caused by black holes in other galaxies, but this is the first such effects seem to be spread across an entire galaxy, NASA said.
The black hole at the center of this particular galaxy is not particularly large relative to the vast array of stars, gases, objects, and other matter spiraling around it—but it’s a major player in its cosmic neighborhood nevertheless. The black hole’s “event horizon is thought to be one million times smaller than the W2246-0526 galaxy, yet the energy emitted by the black hole’s swallowing of material affects gas thousands of light-years away from it,” NASA noted.
Still, it’s big enough—in fact, based on WISE data, scientists believe W2246-0526 is a Hot, Dust-Obscured Galaxy or Hot DOG, a category of very powerful galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers which number just 1 per 3,000 observable galaxies.
Researchers are now trying to figure out if all this gas being blown about W2246-0526 will be “pushed out strongly enough to leave the galaxy entirely, or if it will eventually fall back” into the galaxy’s center, according to NASA and the team from Universidad Diego Portales.
“A likely finale would be that the galaxy will blow out all of the gas and dust that is surrounding it, and we would see the accretion disk without its dust cover — what we call a quasar,” Assef was quoted as saying.