Published:
Jan 25, 2000
The Andromeda Drain
Above: The diffuse light from the Andromeda galaxy is caused by hundreds of billions of stars. The several distinct stars that surround Andromeda's image are actually stars in our Galaxy that are well in front of the background object. Andromeda is frequently referred to as M31 since it is the 31st object on Messier's list of diffuse sky objects.
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Why does a black hole emit X-rays?
It's not really the black hole itself that shines as an X-ray source. Stars and interstellar gas in the vicinity of the hole can be trapped by its powerful gravity.
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Chandra took its first X-ray picture of Andromeda on October 13, 1999, and there were more than 100 individual X-ray sources in the image. Most of them are thought to be binary star systems, but one was located precisely at the galactic center just where the black hole ought to be. This greatly strengthens the case for an awesome concentration of mass at Andromeda's center.
The black hole candidate in Andromeda is big -- 30 million times more massive than our Sun -- but it's not a record setter. Some active galaxies appear to harbor black holes in their nucleus that register between 100 million and a billion solar masses.
Andromeda's black hole appears to be remarkable for a different reason. Data from Chandra's advanced spectrometer showed that the temperature of its accretion disk was just one million degrees. By everyday standards on Earth, that's hot. But to X-ray astronomers it's very cool. Matter doesn't even register on an X-ray telescope until its temperature reaches about one million degrees. For comparison, the other sources in the Chandra image register a sizzling 10 million degrees. They are probably binary star systems in which a normal star orbits a neutron star or a small black hole. The normal star feeds matter to an accretion disk around its dense companion, resulting in X-ray emission from the hot disk. These systems weigh in at just a few to a few tens of solar masses. Theorists expected the accretion disk around the central massive black hole to be at least as hot and energetic as these lightweight systems.
"The Chandra observation is telling us that an entirely different flow pattern [must be] operating around the Andromeda black hole," said Dr. Eliot Quataert, of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J. "This will require a different class of models than we usually consider."
One possibility is that the gas undergoes a large scale boiling motion which slows down the rate at which gas falls into the black hole.
The best previous X-ray pictures were not sharp enough to clearly distinguish the stars near Andromeda's center from the black hole, nor did they give information about the temperature of the source. Chandra has changed all that.
"A good analogy might be to say that previous X-ray images were taken with a slightly out-of-focus black and white camera, while the Chandra image is taken with a sharp, color camera," said Stephen Murray, a member of the Harvard team studying Andromeda. "This is just a first, quick look at our nearest Milky Way analog. I expect that our future pictures will lead to more exciting discoveries in the Andromeda Galaxy."
The Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer, which was used to detect the central black hole in Andromeda, was built for NASA by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and Pennsylvania State University, University Park.Web Links
Chandra home page -from Harvard
another Chandra home page -from NASA
Black Holes -a tutorial about black holes and accretion disks
X-Rays - Another Form of Light - the basics of X-rays from the Chandra home page at Harvard