When supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies accrete matter (usually gas), they give rise to a highly energetic phenomena named Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).
Blazars periodically flare
when the supermassive black holes in some active galaxies» cores fill with dust and gas, releasing massive amounts of energy.
Quasars are rare because they are a brief phase that all galaxies go through,
when the supermassive black hole at their centers consumes matter at a high rate.
Astrophysicists have found that
when a supermassive black hole quickly devours gas and dust, it can generate enough radiation to abort all the embryonic stars in the surrounding galaxy.
«It's very unusual
when a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy actually eats a star, we've probably only seen about 20 of them,» she said.
When the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way consumes an incoming cloud of gas, NASA's Swift telescope will be on the scene.
When a supermassive black hole does exactly that to a star — sphagettifying the burning ball of gas into shreds and devouring it as it comes too close to the black hole's event horizon — the phenomenon is called a tidal disruption event.
Not exact matches
A
supermassive one lurks at the heart of every galaxy — and yet still no one can work out what happens
when matter is swallowed by a
black hole
When the Laser Interferometer Gravitational - Wave Observatory (LIGO) made the first detection of gravitational waves in 2015, for instance, scientists were able to trace them back to two colliding
black holes weighing 36 and 29 solar masses, the lightweight cousins of the
supermassive black holes that power quasars.
Supermassive black holes lurk in the cores of most galaxies, and
when they gobble up matter they also heat the surrounding gas and expel it from the host galaxy in powerful, dense winds [2].
«By combining the detection of gravitational waves with simulations we could ultimately work out
when and how the first seeds of
supermassive black holes formed.»
When two galaxies collide and combine, their
supermassive black holes drift to the center of the newly unified galaxy.
Studying first generation supernovae provides a glimpse into what the Universe looked like
when the first stars, galaxies, and
supermassive black holes formed, but to date it has been difficult to distinguish a first generation supernova from an ordinary supernova.
That would be big enough to see gravitational waves emitted by any merging
supermassive black holes that may have existed around the time
when the universe's first stars began to shine, about a hundred million years after the big bang.
Such rapid growth may help explain how
supermassive black holes were able to reach masses about a billion times higher than the sun
when the universe was only about a billion years old.
Two
supermassive black holes orbiting just a fraction of a light - year apart should emit such waves and then give off a burst of them
when the
black holes merge.
Two teams of astronomers led by researchers at the University of Cambridge have looked back nearly 13 billion years,
when the Universe was less than 10 percent its present age, to determine how quasars — extremely luminous objects powered by
supermassive black holes with the mass of a billion suns — regulate the formation of stars and the build - up of the most massive galaxies.
Astronomers have discovered the oldest
supermassive black hole ever found — a behemoth that grew to 800 million times the mass of the sun
when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age, a new study finds.
When a star moves close to a
supermassive black hole it can be disrupted violently.
Physicist Chiara Mazzucchelli of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and colleagues reported 11 fussy
supermassive black holes that existed
when the universe was less than 800 million years old, in the Astrophysical Journal last November.
The results give important insights into what happens
when a star is destroyed by a
supermassive black hole, but also how newly launched jets behave in a pristine environment.
The scientists incorporated a variety of physical processes in the calculations, including three that are considered particularly important for the development of the visible universe: first, the condensation of matter into stars, second, their further evolution
when the surrounding matter is heated by stellar winds and supernova explosions and enriched with chemical elements, and third, the feedback of
supermassive black holes that eject massive amounts of energy into the universe.
We know this because we see evidence for them in distant quasars - extremely bright light emissions given out
when gas is drawn in by a
supermassive black hole's enormous gravity.
The team also succeeded in explaining, with a theoretical model, that the actual changes (balance of inflow and outflow) in gas levels they observed were the result of the increasing amount of gas falling into the
supermassive black holes within the gas disks enhanced by strong turbulence generated by supernova explosions (an activity associated with star formation)
when a star inside the dense gas disks dies.
When two
supermassive black holes merge, a gravitational wave can well up capable of hurling the merged
black hole from the galaxy.
When several
black holes formed through this rapid funnelling, they would collide and merge with each other to form
supermassive black holes.
Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of galaxies, and when those galaxies collide, eventually their supermassive black holes will first slowly circle each other spiraling inward like water down a drain, then eventually me
Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of galaxies, and
when those galaxies collide, eventually their
supermassive black holes will first slowly circle each other spiraling inward like water down a drain, then eventually me
supermassive black holes will first slowly circle each other spiraling inward like water down a drain, then eventually merge as well.
Supermassive black holes sit in the centers of most galaxies, and
when they eat up matter, they also warm up the nearby gas and discharge it in potent, lustrous winds.
That is
when the star S0 - 2 will be at its closest distance to our galaxy's
supermassive black hole.
When this happened, the
supermassive black hole at the centre of the second galaxy began disrupting the first one's feeding frenzy, thereby preventing accretion — which is what made Markarian 1018 shine brightly in the first place.
This could potentially explain how
supermassive black holes attained masses of a billion times the sun in the early days of the universe,
when it was just about one billion years old.
Based on their observations, they have concluded that the rate of a TDE occurring increases «dramatically»
when two galaxies are colliding, most likely due to the fact that such events cause a large number of stars to be formed near the central
supermassive black holes of the merging systems.
Select the link below to show a spiral galaxy turning into a quasar
when some material is dumped onto the
supermassive black hole at the center.
Our central,
supermassive black hole is relatively quiet
when compared to its counterparts in other galaxies, flaring only occasionally with X-rays and infrared light as objects fall into it.
Blazars occur
when the jet of a
supermassive black hole is pointing toward Earth.
The discovery of so many
supermassive black holes existing
when the universe was only 1.4 billion years old adds to the mystery of how the biggest
black holes evolved.
For many years, astronomers have known two types - «
supermassive»
black holes at the centers of large galaxies and the so - called «stellar - mass»
black holes that result
when a star about 10 times the Sun's mass ends its life in a supernova explosion.
This is the most distant quasar — a
supermassive black hole surrounded by a disk of gas — ever identified and it will help astronomers to better understand exactly how
black holes grew
when the universe was first forming.
At the just - concluded 229th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the gigantic objects were in focus again Saturday
when researchers announced the discovery of two
supermassive black holes relatively close to our own galaxy.
The results suggest that
supermassive black holes send out beams of X-rays
when their surrounding coronas — sources of extremely energetic particles — shoot, or launch, away from the
black holes.
This
supermassive black hole, which has a mass 800 million times greater than the sun, formed
when the universe was only 690 million years old.
«
Supermassive black holes have a lot of influence on the stars around them and the growth and evolution of the galaxy, so understanding more about them and what happens
when they merge with one another could be important for our understanding for the universe,» Taylor said.
Hubble's fine resolution — the ability to see tiny details — helped propel the case for
supermassive black holes even further in 1994,
when astronomers took spectra of the gas in the center of the elliptical galaxy M87.
The observations began
when Swift, which monitors the sky for cosmic outbursts of X-rays and gamma rays, caught a large flare coming from the
supermassive black hole called Markarian 335, or Mrk 335, located 324 million light - years away in the direction of the constellation Pegasus.