Black hole image! 'H' is for Hot and Huge in Chandra X-ray Observatory image, NASA reveals

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 A giant black hole at the center of a massive elliptical galaxy is making a mark on its surroundings, reveals NASA.

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 It has an "H"-shaped structure and is found in a detailed new X-ray map of the multimillion-degree gas around the galaxy Messier 84 (M84).

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As gas is captured by the gravitational force of the black hole, some of it will fall into the abyss, never to be seen again.

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Some of the gas, however, avoids this fate and instead gets blasted away from the black hole in the form of jets of particles. These jets can push out cavities, in the hot gas surrounding the black hole.

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Given the orientation of the jets to Earth and the profile of the hot gas, the cavities in M84 form what appears to resemble the letter “H.”

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The H-shaped structure in the gas is an example of pareidolia, which is when people see familiar shapes or patterns in random data. Pareidolia can occur in all kinds of data from clouds to rocks and astronomical images.

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Astronomers used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to make a map of the hot gas (pink) in and around M84, reaching to within only about 100 light-years away from the black hole in the center of the galaxy.

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This gas radiates at temperatures in the tens of millions of degrees, making it primarily observable in X-rays. The huge letter “H” is about 40,000 light-years tall — about half the width of the Milky Way.

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The radio image from the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) (blue) reveals the jets streaking away from the black hole.

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 Optical data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (white) shows M84 and neighboring galaxies. The letter H and the position of the black hole are labeled.

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An additional graphic shows a close-up of the region marked with a square, and separate labels for the galaxy and the jets in the optical and radio images respectively.

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Researchers studying M84 with Chandra and the VLA found that the jets may influence the flow of the hot gas towards the black hole even more than the gravitational pull from the black hole.