| Description: | Optical images of the central regions of two radio galaxies taken with the (now unfortunately dead!!) Advanced Camera for Survey of the Hubble Space Telescope. In these radio galaxies, fast outflows of gas, with speeds of 1000-2000 km/s, have been detected. In the galaxy on the right, the WSRT has detected an outflow of neutral hydrogen of ~1500 km/s (the other galaxy is too far to the south to be observed with the WSRT). From these images, and the morphologies of the (ionised) gas, we were able to establish that the outflows must be caused by the activity associated with the black hole in the centre of the galaxy, i.e. the gas is pushed out by the radio jets originating from the black hole.
This work will be published in the Astrophysical Journal (Batcheldor, Tadhunter, Holt, Morganti, O'Dea et al. http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0702498). |
