As an international research team reports in the journal Nature, the new images confirm a decades-old theory about “active galactic nuclei.”
These objects are among the most luminous in the universe. They are very powerful energy sources, fed by a supermassive black hole in the center of some galaxies. Fuels are large amounts of cosmic dust and gas billowing toward a black hole, releasing massive amounts of energy as they do so.
The theory of “active galactic nuclei” has been confirmed.
Various manifestations of “active galactic nuclei” are observed, which have been known for decades: some shine brightly in visible light, and others – such as the core of “Messier 77” observed in the current study – shine even darker. According to the theory, despite their differences, they all have the same basic structure: a supermassive black hole surrounded by a thick ring of dust and gas.
According to the Standard Model, the different appearance of the “active galactic nuclei” is due to the angle at which the black hole and its dust ring are viewed from Earth. There have already been some observations supporting this theory, but there are still doubts about whether the dust ring can completely obscure the black hole and thus make the galactic core glow less in visible light.
Researchers led by Violetta Gámez-Rosas of the Dutch University of Leiden now observed the center of the “Messier 77” galaxy, 47 million light-years away, in the infrared range using the VLTI’s Matisse instrument in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The instrument uses interferometry to combine infrared light collected by all four telescopes in the VLT.
Combined with data from other telescopes, the team was able to create a detailed image of the dust and of various temperatures – from room temperature to 1,200 degrees Celsius – to determine exactly where the black hole should be. They see the results as confirmation of the Standard Model for “active galactic nuclei”.
American researcher Robert Antonucci of the University of California, Santa Barbara, also says in an accompanying comment in the journal Nature that: study “The best evidence so far is that the Standard Model is correct.”
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