A black hole eruption spanning 16 times the full moon and located around 12 million light-years away from Earth has been revealed in a new image by astronomers.
The image, which was captured by the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) telescope in Australia, is "the most comprehensive photo of radio emission from an actively feeding supermassive black hole," according to astronomers.
Scientists out of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), report that the emission is powered by a central black hole in a galaxy called Centaurus A, which is the closest eliptical galaxy to the Milky Way.
According to astronomers, the image is caused from the black hole feeding on in-falling gas and then ejecting most of the material at near light-speed on either side of the hole, causing "radio bubbles" to grow over "hundreds of millions of years."
When viewed from Earth, scientists note that the Centaurus A eruption extends eight degrees across the sky -- the length of 16 full moons laid side-by-side, they say.
The research was published Wednesday in peer-reviewed journal Nature Astronomy.
Lead author of the research, Benjamin McKinley from the Curtin University juncture of the ICRAR, said the new image reveals "spectacular" details of the radio emission from the galaxy.
"Previous radio observations could not handle the extreme brightness of the jets and details of the larger area surrounding the galaxy were distorted, but our new image overcomes these limitations," McKinley said in a press release.
McKinley noted that the image offers astronomers new insights into the Centaurus A, specifically around its radio wavelengths and other wavelengths of light.
"In this research we’ve been able to combine the radio observations with optical and X-ray data, to help us better understand the physics of these supermassive black holes," he said.
Massimo Gaspari, of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics, said in the release that the study corroborates a "novel theory" known to astronomers as 'Chaotic Cold Accretion' (CCA).
"In this model, clouds of cold gas condense in the galactic halo and rain down onto the central regions, feeding the supermassive black hole," Gaspari explained. "Triggered by this rain, the black hole vigorously reacts by launching energy back via radio jets that inflate the spectacular lobes we see in the MWA image."
Gaspari says this study is "one of the first to probe in such detail the multi-phase CCA 'weather' over the full range of scales."
McKinley said the galaxy appears brighter in the centre where it is more active and has "a lot" of energy.
"Then it's fainter as you go out because the energy's been lost and things have settled down," McKinley said.
"But there are interesting features where charged particles have re-accelerated and are interacting with strong magnetic fields," he added.
Curtin University professor and deputy executive director of the ICRAR Steven Tingay said capturing such an image was possible because of the MWA telescope's "extremely wide field-of-view, superb radio-quiet location, and excellent sensitivity."
Tingay noted in the release that the MWA is part of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project, an international effort to build the world's largest radio telescope.
"The wide field of view and, as a consequence, the extraordinary amount of data we can collect, means that the discovery potential of every MWA observation is very high. This provides a fantastic step toward the even bigger SKA," he said.
A previous version of this story identified Centaurus A as the closest galaxy to the Milky Way. It is only the closest elliptical galaxy to ours.
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