Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Title: UNAWE Space Scoop – Cosmic Monsters’ Growth Secret
Organization: 365 Days Of Astronomy
Link : http://365daysofastronomy.org/ ; https://www.spacescoop.org/en/scoops/2319/cosmic-monsters-growth-secret/
Description: Space scoop, news for children.
The story of how black holes, especially young ones, grow so fast and become massive, even supermassive, has been puzzling astronomers for a long time.
Well, enter VERA! – the state-of-the-art Japanese network of radio telescopes operated by NAOJ, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. It recently gifted astronomers with a significant clue to the puzzle.
A Toby Jug? Whaaaaat? No, really. Go to Wikipedia and type it in. It’s fascinating!
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society and President of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, a video production company with clients such as Kodak, Xerox and GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He has found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
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Transcript:
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
This is the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast. Today we bring you a new episode in our Space Scoop series. This show is produced in collaboration with Universe Awareness, a program that strives to inspire every child with our wonderful cosmos.
Today’s story is…
Cosmic Monsters’ Growth Secret
The story of how black holes, especially young ones, grow so fast and become massive, even supermassive, has been puzzling astronomers for a long time.
Well, enter VERA! – the state-of-the-art Japanese network of radio telescopes operated by NAOJ, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
It recently gifted astronomers with a significant clue to the puzzle.
Built in 2004, VERA is an array of 4 radio telescope stations placed across Japan with a baseline of 2,300 km.
Each station has the capability to track 2 targets simultaneously, using two receivers.
This allows the 2 receivers to compensate for the Earth’s atmosphere mucking up the phase of the radio waves as they pass through it from the source to the antenna.
VERA was primarily built to do parallax measurements & motion studies of the Milky Way’s maser objects.
Anyway…
Studies show that at the heart of almost all active galaxies lies a supermassive black hole, an SMBH.
These black holes are really massive, almost a million and sometimes a billion times the mass of our Sun.
Scientists think that, sometimes, young black holes can even grow up to become powerful quasars.
But it’s not exactly clear how they grow up.
To understand this, a team of astronomers began to study a special category of active galaxies known as Narrow-line Seyfert 1, or NLS1, galaxies.
These galaxies are thought to contain small but rapidly growing black holes and so they’re perfect to study the early years of these “cosmic monsters”.
The team observed the heart of six NLS1 galaxies using the highly powerful and sensitive VERA array that I mentioned earlier.
They detected a faint polarized radio wave coming from the galactic cores.
The plane of polarization of the waves is rotated by what’s called Faraday rotation as the SMBH’s light passes through gas that is present in the region around it.
The amount of rotation is in direct proportion to the density of the gas and the strength of the magnetic field in the gas.
This is the gas that the SMBH is feeding on and growing from.
With the wealth of data from this detection, astronomers took measurements that indicated the presence of large amounts of gas around the galactic cores.
The cosmic monsters must have been inhaling these gases making them grow faster and more powerful.
Hey, here’s a cool fact!
Did you know that VERA’s eyesight is over 100 thousand times more powerful than the human eye?
It’s all because of the VLBI technique.
VLBI, or Very Long Baseline Interferometry, was even used in 2019 to produce an image of an SMBH in the galaxy M87, 53 million light years away!
Whoa!
Thank you for listening to the 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast!
365 Days of Astronomy
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