Markarian 817 is the Seyfert 1 galaxy located 430 million light-years away in the constellation Draco. Also known as Mrk 817 or QSO J1436+5847, it hosts an active supermassive black hole of 81 million solar masses.
This artist's impression shows super-fast winds blowing from the center of the galaxy Markarian 817. These winds travel at millions of kilometers per hour and remove interstellar gas from vast regions of space. Without this gas, galaxies cannot form new stars, and the black holes at the galaxies' centers have little left to eat. The inset shows what is happening at the center of the galaxy. A supermassive black hole draws in gas from its surroundings to form a hot, brightly lit accretion disk (orange). The wind (white) is caused by a magnetic field within the disk, which causes particles to fly in all directions at incredibly high speeds. These winds effectively block the X-rays (blue) emitted by the extremely hot plasma surrounding the black hole, called the corona.Zack other. Using his X-ray telescope XMM-Newton at ESA, he captured Markarian 817 blowing out super-fast winds. This wind, which lasts for about a year, will have a major impact on star formation in the galaxy. The fact that black holes at the centers of galaxies exhibited fairly average activity levels before generating winds suggests that supervelocity black hole winds are much more common than previously thought. doing. In other words, black holes and their host galaxies strongly influence each other's evolution. Image credit: ESA / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.
At the center of every large galaxy is a supermassive black hole whose enormous gravitational pull pulls in gas from its surroundings.
As the gas spirals inward, it collects in a flat accretion disk around the black hole, where it heats up and glows.
Over time, the gas closest to the black hole passes the point of no return and gets swallowed up.
But black holes consume only a portion of the gas that swirls toward them.
While surrounding the black hole, some matter is bounced back into space, much like a messy toddler spilling everything on his plate.
In a more dramatic episode, a black hole turns the entire table upside down. The gas in the accretion disk is thrown off in all directions at such high velocities that it wipes out the surrounding interstellar gas.
This not only deprives the black hole of food, but also means that new stars cannot form over large areas and the structure of the galaxy changes.
Until now, this ultrafast black hole wind had only been detected as coming from a very bright accretion disk at the limit of its ability to pull in matter.
At this time, ESA's XMM-Newton spacecraft detected superfast winds in Markarian 817, a decidedly average galaxy that could be described as “just having a snack.”
“With the fans on the highest setting, we would expect very fast winds,” said Dr. Miranda Zak, an astronomer at the University of Michigan.
“In the galaxy we studied called Markarian 817, the fans were turned on at a lower power setting, but still produced incredibly energetic winds.”
“It is very rare to observe ultrafast winds, and even rarer to detect winds with enough energy to change the properties of the host galaxy.”
“The fact that Markarian 817 produced these winds for about a year, even though it was not particularly active, suggests that the black hole may have changed the shape of its host galaxy much more than previously thought. “This suggests that there is a sex,” said Roman astronomer Elias Cammun. Tre University.
Active galactic nuclei emit high-energy light, including X-rays. Markarian 817 stood out to astronomers because it was extremely quiet.
“The X-ray signal was so weak that I knew I was doing something wrong,” Zak said.
Follow-up observations using ESA's XMM Newton revealed what was actually happening. The superfast winds from the accretion disk acted like a shroud, blocking the X-rays emitted from the black hole's immediate surroundings.
These measurements were supported by observations made with NASA's NuSTAR telescope.
Detailed analysis of X-ray measurements revealed that Markarian 817's center did not send out a single puff of gas, but instead created a gust of wind storm over a wide area of the accretion disk.
The winds lasted for hundreds of days and consisted of at least three distinct components, each traveling at a few percent of the speed of light.
This solves an unsolved puzzle in understanding how black holes and their surrounding galaxies interact with each other.
Many galaxies, including the Milky Way, appear to have large regions around their centers where few new stars form.
This could be explained by black hole winds sweeping away star-forming gas, but this works only if the winds are fast enough, persist long enough, and are produced by black holes at typical activity levels. limited to cases where
“One of the many unresolved problems in black hole research is the problem of achieving detection through long-term observations over many hours to capture important events,” said Dr. Norbert Schartel, a scientist on the XMM-Newton project. says.
“This highlights the paramount importance of the XMM-Newton mission into the future.”
“No other mission can achieve that combination of high sensitivity and the ability to make long, uninterrupted observations.”
a paper Regarding the survey results, Astrophysics Journal Letter.
_____
Miranda K. Zackother. 2024. Seyfert 1.2 Markarian 817 Hidden Sub-Eddington Feedback Intense Feedback.APJL 962, L1; doi: 10.3847/2041-8213/ad1407
