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Hubble Space Telescope Spies Galactic Black Hole 'Burp'
By Daniel Sorid
Staff Writer
posted: 05:56 pm ET
05 June 2000
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hubble_burp_000605 To someone who has just eaten an enormous meal, a little indigestion is not surprising. The same is true, not just for animals, but for black holes as well. New images from the Hubble Space Telescope show a large black hole spewing bubbles of hot gas into space. The bubbles are a side effect of the black hole's massive sucking action.Jeffrey Kenney and Elizabeth Yale, both of Yale University, took the images in March 1999. As the black hole sucks matter into its accretion hole (shown below, as the white disk in the center), some gas is jettisoned; when those gases crash into a wall of still, dense gas they glow with energy. In the picture below, which has been colorized for clarity, the red circle near the accretion hole is the bubble of gas. The bubble itself is 800 light-years long and 800 light-years in width. (A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, approximately 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers.) Another faint bubble can be seen below and to the right of the white circle. One of the bubbles is larger, not because it has more material, but because it has slammed into some additional stationary gas. 
The black hole is located in the hub of a galaxy called NGC 4438, whose light takes 50 million years to reach Earth. The galaxy as a whole can be seen in the picture below. 
The findings were presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Rochester, New York. The pictures were taken with the Hubble's wide-field camera. Black holes are arguably the most intriguing celestial objects. Black holes can be formed from the death of a massive star that collapses on itself. The star is compressed until it has very little volume but huge mass, and becomes a supremely powerful gravitational abyss. As black holes do not give off light, they cannot be photographed directly. But swirls of matter being drawn down into a tiny dark object are telltale signs of a black hole.
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