HOW does a black hole gulp down matter? The question has puzzled astronomers for years, but now the Very Large Telescope in Chile has captured the process in detail.
NGC 1097, a spiral galaxy about 45 million light years from Earth, glows relatively brightly at its centre at visible and X-ray wavelengths, suggesting that a black hole is devouring surrounding gas and dust. But until now the glare from nearby stars made it impossible to get any good images of the process.
Almudena Prietro at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, and his colleagues used one of the VLT鈥檚 four 8-metre telescopes to take near-infrared images of matter whirling towards the galaxy鈥檚 heart. They applied adaptive optics to correct for the blurring effect of the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere and then subtracted the bright light from stars in the galaxy. This revealed dim spiral arms of dust and gas streaming to within a few tens of light years of the black hole鈥檚 mouth (Astronomical Journal, vol 130, p 1472).
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鈥淭his is possibly the first detailed view of the channelling process, from the main part of the galaxy down to the end in the nucleus,鈥� says Prietro.
Researchers have previously looked at what happens around black holes on scales of 1000 light years and within a single light year, adds co-author Witold Maciejewski of the University of Oxford. 鈥淣ow we鈥檙e starting to see the connection.鈥�
