Daily Image
07-07-2014
A supermassive black hole blasting molecular gas from a galaxy at one million kilometers per hour
| Submitter: | Raffaella Morganti, Tom Oosterloo & Raymond Oonk |
| Description: | Massive outflows driven by active galactic nuclei are widely recognized to have a key role in the evolution of galaxies. These outflows heat the ambient gas, expel it from the central regions of the galaxy, and thereby affecting the star formation process of the galaxy. It has been proposed that the powerful jets of relativistic particles (such as electrons) launched by active nuclei can both accelerate and heat the molecular gas, which often dominates the mass budgets of the outflows. Clear evidence for this mechanism, in the form of detailed associations between the molecular gas kinematics and features in the radio-emitting jets, has however been lacking. In a paper which appeared in Nature today (led by Clive Tadhunter (Sheffield) and including Raffaella Morganti, Tom Oosterloo (ASTRON/Kapteyn Institute) and Raymond Oonk (ASTRON/Leiden)), the first unambiguous evidence that jets do indeed drive molecular outflows is presented. Observations with the ISAAC spectrograph at the VLT show that the warm molecular hydrogen gas at the location of the western radio lobe of the Seyfert galaxy IC 5063 is moving at high velocities -up to about 600 kilometres per second- relative to the galaxy disk. The fact that the outflow exactly occurs at the location where the jet hits the interstellar medium, strongly suggests that the molecules have been accelerated by fast shocks driven into the interstellar medium by the expanding radio jets. This result will inspire many further observations. In particular ALMA is very well suited to image in great detail the kinematics of molecular gas in galaxies and is a great instrument to use to further study the physics of jet driven gas outflows (stay tuned...). The full title of the paper is: Jet acceleration of the fast molecular outflows in the Seyfert galaxy IC 5063, C. Tadhunter (Sheffield), R. Morganti (Astron/Groningen), M. Rose (CfA), J. B. R. Oonk (Astron/Leiden) & T. Oosterloo (Astron/Groningen) and is available on Astro-ph : http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1407.1332 |
| Copyright: | Astron |
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