Astronomers have, for the first time, watched the moment a feeding supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy spat out a jet of material at one-third of the speed of light. Plus, the structure is technically made up of two jets, each about half a light-year across.
The black hole in question, which has a mass around 1.4 billion times that of the sun, is located at the heart of a galaxy designated 1ES 1927+654. It’s located about 270 million light-years away in the constellation Draco.
“The launch of a black hole jet has never been observed before in real-time,” discovery team leader and University Eileen Meyer said in a statement. “We think the outflow began earlier, when the X-rays increased prior to the radio flare, and the jet was screened from our view by hot gas until it broke out early last year.”
Astronomers are very familiar with the twin jets launched from the poles of supermassive black holes. These structures can stretch for distances as great as 23 million light-years, extending way above and below the plane of the galaxy from which they erupt.
Such jets are standard in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in which black holes within galaxies feast on gas and dust surrounding them. The material that doesn’t fall into the maw of the central black hole can be channeled to the poles of the black hole.
In those poles, powerful magnetic fields accelerate these particles until they erupt highly collimated jets outwards at speeds that are equivalent to a considerable fraction of the speed of light.
Though astronomers observe many of these astrophysical jets, they had never seen one as it erupts in real time before.
Thus, this discovery could help better understand how these powerful astrophysical jets initially develop.
A ‘sleeping giant’ bursts to life
Astronomers first became fascinated by the black hole of 1ES 1927+654 in 2018 when it flared with a major outburst seen in optical, ultraviolet and X-ray light.
After this, the cosmic monster fell quiet for a year before it flared in X-rays again in April 2023 (that led to an entirely different fascinating discovery).
This prompted researchers from the University of Maryland Baltimore County to begin looking at 1ES 1927+654 again in radio waves using a cornucopia of telescopes, including the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA).
With the VLBA’s ability to distinguish features less than a light-year across, even at 270 million light-years away, what they discovered was a highly unusual radio wave flare underway.
As seen above, the radio images of 1ES 1927+654 collected from February, April, and May 2024 showed emerging structures erupting from either side of the supermassive black hole.
The team suggested these structures are jets of highly ionized gas or “plasma” erupting from both sides of the black hole of 1ES 1927+654 following the strong radio flare.
The first image in the animation above was taken in June 2023, showing no sign of jets. That may be because the “donut” of dense gas surrounding the black hole obscured the jets, hiding them from view.
By the final image in the animation, the jets have each reached a total length of about half a light-year from their source close to the central supermassive black hole.
The team presented their research at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in National Harbor, Maryland, on Monday (Jan. 13).
Their results were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on the same day.
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