Astronomers have photographed a black hole in the center of a spiral galaxy

 

Employees of the European Southern Observatory  said  that they received images of the spiral galaxy NGC 7582, in the center of which is a supermassive black hole.

The galaxy NGC 7582 is located 70 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Crane. In its core is a supermassive black hole. 

The galactic core of NGC 7582 is supplied with energy by a black hole. In the process of this interaction, matter heats up and emits a huge amount of energy and powerful streams of particles into the surrounding space.

The authors decided to find out what effect this process has on the entire galaxy. They looked at how the various ionized elements are distributed in it.

In the image to the right, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen are shown in blue, green, and red, respectively. The red ones are areas of high star formation activity, the dominant blue areas show the cone-shaped material that comes from the active galactic nucleus.

The image on the left shows the same area. But this is a more classic perception of the galaxy - there are dust lanes in the photo that obscure the blue and orange light from the stars.

The MUSE receiver made it possible to form a map of the movements of stars and gas. It turned out that the central supermassive black hole in NGC 7582 may be surrounded by some kind of structure that shields the rest of the galaxy from a powerful flow of energy that flows from the galactic core. This stream turns in the opposite direction and forms an intense stellar wind.