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[theweaselking]

Hubble discovers a 1-light-year disk with 400 young, hot blue stars surrounding the heart of the Andromeda galaxy. That puzzles astronomers because the black hole's intense gravitational field should have torn apart any clouds of matter long before they could coalesce to form new stars.

The stars form a very flat disc that is only one light year across. An elliptical disc of older red stars surrounds it, spanning about five light years. Since the two discs appear to be in the same plane, they are probably related, but no one yet understands how either disc came into being.

The disc of blue stars is only about 200 million years old, while the galaxy itself has been around for about 12 billion years. Intriguingly, there are signs of young stars very close to the core of our own galaxy as well.



Measurements by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph also allowed astronomers to determine the movement of the blue stars and therefore pinpoint the black hole's mass.

This proved conclusively that it really is a supermassive black hole, with a mass 140 million times that of our Sun - three times more massive than previous estimates.

Until these observations, it had been impossible to rule out some highly unlikely alternatives for the object in the centre of the galaxy - including an extremely dense star cluster, says team member John Kormendy at the University of Texas, US.

"Nailing the black hole in Andromeda" will be remembered as one of Hubble's most important findings, Kormendy says. "It makes us much more confident that the other central dark objects detected in galaxies are black holes too."

Comments

[unnamed525.livejournal.com]

Apparently, the laws of physics are not quite what we think they are.
Excellent.