14 DAY TRIAL // These days, almost all ground- and orbit-based telescopes are aimed at only one point in the sky, namely the Centaurus A galaxy, situated in the southern constellation of Centaurus, some 13 million light-years away from Earth. Currently, the supermassive black hole that lies at the center of that galaxy is undergoing a vast particle blast process, spilling out jets of matter and radiation, in almost all wavelengths, from radio to x-ray and ultraviolet. Compared to the one at the core of the Milky Way, the black hole in Centaurus A is a genuine giant, weighing some 25 times more than our own.
According to estimates, the center of the galaxy weighs in the vicinity of 100 million solar masses, whereas the center of the Milky Way only has 4 million times the mass of our Sun. Experts say that the impressive display of energy is caused by the fact that Centaurus A is in fact a gigantic particle accelerator, where matter is made to spin at incredible speeds, close to that of light.
In addition, the highly-active galaxy is now in process of colliding with a nearby spiral galaxy, which triggers a “frantic” star formation activity in its active regions, close to the inner core. In other words, the central portion of the galaxy is now a “war zone” so to speak, a place where matter and gas are heated and accelerated in a seemingly chaotic manner at massive speeds, and then are thrown away from the galaxy into the vastness around. And all these large-scale processes are driven by the supermassive black hole in the middle, which sucks matter at very high speeds.
In order to obtain the latest data about Centaurus A, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) combined readings from its own La Silla, Chile-based 2.2-meter telescope with X-ray views from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and images from the APEX Bolometer Camera (LABOCA), belonging to the international APEX submillimeter-wave radio telescope, also in Chile.
The data thus obtained confirms that the black hole emits beams of accelerated particles, mostly in radio and X-ray wavelengths, from its two poles. The beams most likely travel millions of light-years before they fade away, but the process seems to pose no difficulty for the massive matter-sucker at the center, which seems to be able to sustain such impressive emission standards for as long as it wants.