The Bright Core of This Spiral Galaxy Reveals an Actively Feeding Supermassive Black Hole - by spacewriter
Here’s another Seyfert galaxy as seen by Hubble. It’s called Messier 77. The streaks of red and blue in the image are star formation regions in the arms, with dark dust lanes stretching across the galaxy’s starry centre. This Seyfert has highly ionised gas surrounding an intensely active center. Courtesy NASA/ESA/STScI.
Astronomers classify Seyferts into Type 1 and Type II objects. If you look at their emission lines , the data show that each kind has highly excited gas near the black hole. There are important differences though. The Type 1 Seyferts have very “broad” lines, which means that the gas is moving very quickly around the black hole—at velocities more than 1,000 km/sec. On the other hand, the Type II Seyferts have narrower lines, and that means gas in the core is moving much more slowly.
Our own Milky Way is not currently a Seyfert. However, it does have a central supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*. Right now, it’s very quiet, only occasionally gobbling large amounts of gas and dust. It could have been a Seyfert in the past, or it could be in the future if something happens to feed our black hole and cause it to “erupt” with activity.In the HST image of this spiral its arms have bands of dust threaded throughout, and there are star birth regions here and there.
The core of the galaxy looks like there’s a bar feeding material into the core. In many spiral galaxies, the bars host stellar nurseries. Astronomers are quite interested in these bars because they indicate something about the age and evolutionary state of the galaxy itself. Interestingly, central bars may come and go every couple of billion years.
And, then there’s that bright central region, where the monster black hole lives and feeds. It’s likely quite massive—millions or billions of times the mass of our Sun. Sucn objects influence the evolution of their galaxies, and astronomers are still working to understand how that works. Of course, in addition to studying distant Seyfert galaxies like NGC 5495, they also look at the one in our own galaxy.
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