ALMA Measures Determines Black Hole Mass With High Degree Of Accuracy

Modern astrophysicists confirm the existence of supermassive black holes at the core of their host galaxies, weighing a million or billion times the Sun. However, to practically quantify their masses, physicists need to measure the strength of the gravitational pull on it's surrounding celestial objects.

Astronomers gathered crucial information with the help of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). With the help of such sophisticated instruments, they witnessed the astounding accretion disk and were able to shed light on cold interstellar gas encompassing a super massive black hole, located in a neighbourhood elliptical galaxy. The National Radio Astronomy observatory press release claims this to be the first fruitful attempt to supervise related mass measurements with such accuracy, outside our mother galaxy.

ALMA_Black_hole_detection
Integrated image of NGC 1332 features the central disk of gas surrounding the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy

Aaron Barth, a lead author and an astronomer at the University of California, Irvine had taken the help of ALMA to constantly calculate the speed of carbon monoxide gas in orbit, surrounding the black hole of a behemoth elliptical galaxy at a distance of 73 million light-years from the Earth. This elliptical galaxy is known as NGC 1332. Barth explained that even with high-end instruments, accurate mass measurement can be challenging. The ALMA is designed specifically to observe a black hole's effect on the rotational speed of the disk.

The ALMA results comply with the air speed that flows at a speed of 500 kilometres per second, near the mid-region of disk. The results were verified using a simulation result which concluded that the black hole is 660 million times larger than the Sun, with an error of 10% in calculation. The results carry special importance, as the mass of the black hole might be less than 1% of the total mass of universe, it might provide a vivid picture of our universe, which mostly comprises dark matter.

Other contemporary techniques of determining black hole mass consists of a method whose key logic depends on the objects placed in close proximity with the black hole. Although, such methods maintain a high specification in terms of accuracy it could be only put to use while determining black holes in our own galaxy. The research report has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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