Journey to Spiral Galaxy NGC 4945 in Centaurus | ESO

Journey to Spiral Galaxy NGC 4945 in Centaurus | ESO

This video zooms in on the spiral galaxy NGC 4945, starting with a wide-angle view made with an amateur telescope, then to an image from Digitized Sky Survey 2, and finishing with an image made with the 2.2-meter MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla.

This little corner of space, near the constellation of Centaurus and over 12 million light-years away, may seem peaceful at first—but NGC 4945 is locked in a violent struggle.

At the very center of nearly every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. Like the one at the center of our own Milky Way, it is not particularly "hungry". However, NGC 4945’s supermassive black hole is ravenous, consuming huge amounts of matter—and the MUSE instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has caught it "playing with its food." This "messy eater", contrary to a black hole’s typical all-consuming reputation, is blowing out powerful winds of material. 

This is part of a new study that measured how winds move in several nearby galaxies. The MUSE observations show that these incredibly fast winds demonstrate a strange behavior: they actually speed up far away from the central black hole, accelerating even more on their journey to the galactic outskirts.

This process ejects potential star-forming material from a galaxy, suggesting that black holes control the fates of their host galaxies by dampening the stellar birth rate. It also shows that the more powerful black holes impede their own growth by removing the gas and dust they feed on, driving the whole system closer towards a sort of galactic equilibrium. Now, with these new results, we are one step closer to understanding the acceleration mechanism of the winds responsible for shaping the evolution of galaxies, and the history of the universe.

Credit: ESO, Digitized Sky Survey 2, A. Fujii.

Duration: 1 minute
Release Date: Sept. 2, 2009

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