Context: A roughly dough-nut-shaped cloud of cosmic dust and gas covering a huge black hole at the center of a galaxy Messier 77, which is similar in size to the Milky Way, was recently observed.
The observation is providing scientists with new clarity about the universe’s most energetic objects.
Key takeaways
Their recent observations lend support to predictions made three decades ago about “active galactic nuclei”.
It also provided strong support for the “unified model” of active galactic nuclei.
This model holds that all active galactic nuclei are basically the same but that some have different properties.
Active galactic nuclei
These are places at the centres of many large galaxies that have tremendous luminosity which sometimes outshine all of a galaxy’s billions of stars combined and produce the universe’s most energetic outbursts.
The energy arises from gas violently falling into a supermassive black hole that is surrounded by a cloud of tiny particles of rock and soot along with mostly hydrogen gas.
Black holes
Black holes are extraordinarily dense objects possessing gravitational pulls so powerful even light cannot escape them.
Supermassive black holes, which reside at the centre of many galaxies, including Milky Way, are the largest of them.
Messier 77
Messier 77, also called NGC 1068 or the Squid Galaxy, is located 47 million light years (9.5 trillion km) from the Earth in the constellation Cetus.
Its supermassive black hole has a mass roughly 10 million times greater than our sun.