Markarian 817 is a Seyfert 1 galaxy located 430 million light-years away in the constellation of Draco. Also known as Mrk 817 or QSO J1436+5847, it hosts an active supermassive black hole with a mass of 81 million solar masses.
This artist impression shows ultra-fast winds blasting out from the center of galaxy Markarian 817. These winds, moving at many millions of km per hour, clear out interstellar gas from a vast region of space. Without this gas, the galaxy can’t form new stars and the black hole in the galactic center has little left to eat. The inset shows what is happening at galaxy’s heart. A supermassive black hole draws in gas from its surroundings, which forms a hot, brightly lit accretion disk (orange). The cause of the winds (white) is magnetic fields within the disk, which fling particles out in all directions at incredibly high speeds. These winds effectively block out X-rays (blue) which are sent out by the extremely hot plasma surrounding the black hole, called the corona. Zak et al. caught Markarian 817 blasting out ultra-fast winds using ESA’s X-ray telescope XMM-Newton. Lasting for around a year, the winds will have significantly affected star formation in the galaxy. The fact that the black hole at the center of the galaxy was showing rather average activity levels before producing the winds suggests that ultra-fast black hole winds are much more common than previously thought. In other words, black holes and their host galaxies strongly affect each other’s evolution. Image credit: ESA / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
At the heart of every large galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, whose immense gravity draws in gas from its surroundings.
As the gas spirals inwards, it bunches up in a flat accretion disk around the black hole, where it heats and lights up.
Over time, the gas closest to the black hole passes the point of no return and gets gobbled up.
However, black holes only consume a fraction of the gas spiraling towards them.
While encircling a black hole, some matter is flung back out into space, much like how a messy toddler spills a lot of what lies on their plate.
In more dramatic episodes, a black hole will flip over the entire dinner table: gas in the accretion disk gets flung out in all directions at such high speeds that it clears out the surrounding interstellar gas.
Not only does this deprive the black hole of food, it also means no new stars can form over a vast region, changing the structure of the galaxy.
Until now, this ultra-fast black hole wind had only been detected coming from extremely bright accretion disks, which are at the limit of how much matter they can draw in.
This time, ESA’s XMM-Newton spacecraft detected ultra-fast wind in Markarian 817, a distinctly average galaxy which you could say was ‘only snacking.’
“You might expect very fast winds if a fan was turned on to its highest setting,” said Dr. Miranda Zak, an astronomer at the University of Michigan.
“In the galaxy we studied, called Markarian 817, the fan was turned on at a lower power setting, but there were still incredibly energetic winds being generated.”
“It is very uncommon to observe ultra-fast winds, and even less common to detect winds that have enough energy to alter the character of their host galaxy.”
“The fact that Markarian 817 produced these winds for around a year, while not being in a particularly active state, suggests that black holes may reshape their host galaxies much more than previously thought,” said Dr. Elias Kammoun, an astronomer at the Roma Tre University.
Active galactic nuclei send out high-energy light, including X-rays. Markarian 817 stood out to the astronomers because it went awfully quiet.
“The X-ray signal was so faint that I was convinced I was doing something wrong,” Zak said.
Follow-up observations using ESA’s XMM-Newton revealed what was really happening: ultra-fast winds coming from the accretion disk were acting like a shroud, blocking out the X-rays sent out from the immediate surroundings of the black hole.
These measurements were backed up by observations made with NASA’s NuSTAR telescope.
A detailed analysis of the X-ray measurements showed that, far from sending out a single ‘puff’ of gas, the center of Markarian 817 produced a gusty storm over a wide area in the accretion disk.
The wind lasted for several hundreds of days and consisted of at least three distinct components, each moving at several percent of the speed of light.
This solves an open puzzle in our understanding of how black holes and the galaxies around them influence one another.
There are many galaxies — including the Milky Way — that appear to have large regions around their centers in which very few new stars form.
This could be explained by black hole winds that clear out the star-forming gas, but this only works if the winds are fast enough, sustained for long enough, and are generated by black holes with typical levels of activity.
“Many outstanding problems in the study of black holes are a matter of achieving detections through long observations that stretch over many hours to catch important events,” said XMM-Newton project scientist Dr. Norbert Schartel.
“This highlights the prime importance of the XMM-Newton mission for the future.”
“No other mission can deliver the combination of its high sensitivity and its ability to make long, uninterrupted observations.”
A paper on the findings was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Miranda K. Zak et al. 2024. Fierce Feedback in an Obscured, Sub-Eddington State of the Seyfert 1.2 Markarian 817. ApJL 962, L1; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad1407
Source : Breaking Science News