Feeding a Black Hole

Black Hole

New images of the VLT (Very Large Telescope) show details how matter spirals toward the black hole in the center of a galaxy:  The Photo shows the whole of galaxy NGC1097. As this striking image reveals, NGC 1097 presents a centre that consists of a broken ring of bright knots surrounding the galaxy's nucleus.

 

Click here for a high resolution photograph.

 

"This is the first time that a detailed view of the channelling process of matter, from the main part of the galaxy down to the very end in the nucleus is released," says Almudena Prieto (Max-Planck Institute, Heidelberg, Germany), lead author of the paper describing these results. Located about 45 million light-years away in the southern constellation Fornax (the Furnace), NGC 1097 is a relatively bright, spiral galaxy seen face-on.

 An image of NGC 1097 and its small companion, NGC 1097A, was taken in December 2004 with the VIMOS instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT). In this image, available as ESO PR Photo 35d/04, NGC 1097 has a strongly elongated, non-circular feature called a bar, and a prominent ring inside the bar. The astronomers also note that the curling of the spiral pattern in the innermost 300 lightyears seem indeed to confirm the presence of a super-massive black hole in the centre of NGC 1097. Such a black hole in the centre of a galaxy causes the nuclear spiral to wind up as it approaches the centre, while in its absence the spiral would be unwinding as it moves closer to the centre. More details on Eureka Alerts: Feeding the Monster

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