Actively feeding supermassive black holes are known as quasars, and they can outshine all the stars of their host galaxy. Part of their brightness comes from the accretion disk surrounding the black hole, but they're hard to image directly because quasars are so far away. New data from one of the world's largest telescopes has managed this feat, detecting near-infrared emission lines that mark significant regions in the accretion disk in a quasar.
We do have a basic gauge of the size of accretion disks. One of the things we’ve noticed with quasars is that they can fluctuate in brightness. Quasars are supermassive black holes with a radio-bright accretion disk. Given the finite speed of light, the rate of fluctuations gives us an upper bound on the size of the accretion disk. So for example, if a quasar fluctuates on the scale of a year, we know the accretion disk can’t be larger than about a light-year across.
But this is only an upper bound, and the accretion disk could be smaller. Without a direct measure of an accretion disk, we rely on computer simulations to estimate its size. But this recent work has measured the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole directly, which gives us a step up in understanding black holes.To achieve this, the team used a different approach.
From this spectral data, the team determined that the black hole is about 400 – 900 million solar masses, and its axis of rotation is tilted about 18 degrees relative to our line of sight. The peaks of the hydrogen line are about 16.8 light-days from the black hole, and the peaks of the oxygen line are about 18.9 light-days from the black hole. That means the accretion disk is around 40 light-days across.
This result is just the first step. The team continues to observe III Zw 002 and hopes to be able to study how the accretion disk precesses around the black hole over time, which will tell us about the dynamics between the two.
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