First-ever direct image of the dusty 'torus' ring surrounding a supermassive black hole is captured by scientists
- Cygnus A is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky and was imaged by VLA
- It is approximately 800 million light-years away and spews out radio waves
- Imagery shows the dusty ring - or torus - which circles the enormous black hole
Astronomers have taken the first-ever direct image of a dusty doughnut swirling around a supermassive black hole.
The ring - known as a torus - was imaged around the black hole at the centre of Cygnus A, one of the most powerful radio galaxies in the Universe.
Most galaxies have a black hole at the core that pulls debris into its orbit which then circles and swirls around the centre in a disc.
Some of this material falls into the black hole, fuelling the vast black hole and causing it to shoot out vast jets of plasma.
Direct images were impossible until now due to the incredible gravity of black holes sucking in everything - even light.
Astronomers have taken the first-ever direct image of a dusty doughnut swirling around a supermassive black hole (artist's impression, pictured). The ring - known as a torus - was imaged around the core of Cygnus A, one of the most powerful radio galaxies in the Universe
Cygnus A is approximately 800 million light-years away and is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky.
The black hole at the centre of this galaxy has a mass of approximately the same as 2.5 billion suns.
Imagery of the ultra-bright emissions came courtesy of the astronomers using the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope.
The image contributes to a growing school of thought which claims these dust riddled black holes, known collectively as active galactic nuclei (AGN), form the centre of enormously powerful galaxies.
'The torus is an essential part of the AGN phenomenon, and evidence exists for such structures in nearby AGN of lower luminosity, but we've never before directly seen one in such a brightly-emitting radio galaxy,' said Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
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Observations from the VLA reveal the gas in the torus around Cygnus A's enormous black hole (pictured). Cygnus A is approximately 800 million light-years away and is one of the brightest radio sources in the sky
'The torus helps explain why objects known by different names actually are the same thing, just observed from a different perspective.'
Observations from the VLA reveal the gas in the torus around Cygnus A's enormous black hole.
'Cygnus A is the closest example of a powerful radio-emitting galaxy, 10 times closer than any other with comparably powerful radio emission,' said the NRAO's Rick Perley.
'That proximity allowed us to find the torus in a high-resolution VLA image of the galaxy's core.
WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?
Black holes are so dense and their gravitational pull is so strong that no form of radiation can escape them - not even light.
They act as intense sources of gravity which hoover up dust and gas around them.
Their intense gravitational pull is thought to be what stars in galaxies orbit around.
How they are formed is still poorly understood.
Supermassive black holes are incredibly dense areas in the centre of galaxies with masses that can be billions of times that of the sun. They cause dips in space-time (artist's impression) and even light cannot escape their gravitational pull
Astronomers believe they may form when a large cloud of gas up to 100,000 times bigger than the sun, collapses into a black hole.
Many of these black hole seeds then merge to form much larger supermassive black holes, which are found at the centre of every known massive galaxy.
Alternatively, a supermassive black hole seed could come from a giant star, about 100 times the sun's mass, that ultimately forms into a black hole after it runs out of fuel and collapses.
When these giant stars die, they also go 'supernova', a huge explosion that expels the matter from the outer layers of the star into deep space.
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