Supermassive Black Hole "Caught Playing with its Food" | ESO

Supermassive Black Hole "Caught Playing with its Food" | ESO

This picture shows a stunning spiral galaxy known as NGC 4945. 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.

This image gives us a close-up view of the galaxy NGC 4945’s active core—clouds of dust and gas obscuring its supermassive black hole. We can also see a clear shot of the great galactic winds flowing out from this black hole, shown here in the bright, cone-shaped jets of material at the centre of the picture. These observations, taken with the MUSE instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), are helping astronomers understand how these winds move and shape their host galaxies.

The first image shows a stunning spiral galaxy known as NGC 4945. 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 cone-shaped wind is shown in red in the inset, overlaid on a wider image captured with the MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla. In fact, this wind is moving so fast that it will end up escaping the galaxy altogether, lost to the void of intergalactic space.

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.

Image Description: The first image shows a lone spiral galaxy, spinning on its side against a backdrop of distant stars. This thin disc of gas and dust contains many bright spots of reds and blues, stars faintly glowing, partially obscured by a dark flowing cloud of grey and brown. A small inset image zooms in on the galaxy’s bright center, revealing a wealth of hidden activity in a whole new wavelength of light. Artificially colored with shades of red, this inset image shows a cone of bright material exploding from within the flowing dust and gas like a volcanic eruption.

Credit: ESO/C. Marconcini et al.
Release Date: March 31, 2025

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