Credit: JAXA
Astronomers have successfully used XRISM (which stands for “X-ray imaging and spectroscopy task‘) to bring the surroundings of the black hole and supernova remnant into sharp focus. XRISM is the X-ray space telescope of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with which ESA also collaborated, and with this telescope they recently made observations of the super-hot plasma surrounding the black hole and supernova remnants. The supernova remnant is called N132D and is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 160,000 light-years away. N132D is the result of a supernova that happened about 3000 years ago. In the picture above, you can see the result of the observations. XRISM was able to create a spectrum of the relic, which shows that the relic contains iron at a temperature of at least 10 billion K. Shock waves from the expanding crust in interstellar space made the iron so hot. The hot plasma expands at a speed of about 1200 km/s.
Credit: JAXA
Seen with XRISM, the supermassive black hole is located in the spiral galaxy NGC 4151, 62 million light-years away. The spectrum could also be created using the XRISM technique from the plasma in the vicinity of that black hole, which weighs about 30 million solar masses. XRISM showed the distribution and motion of matter around the black hole varying from 0.001 to 0.1 light years (that’s roughly up to 100 times the distance between the Sun and Uranus). Astronomers were able to clearly map the structure of the donut-shaped distribution of gas around the black hole.
Scientific articles based on the results of XRISM have been submitted for publication Astronomical Society of Japan in Astrophysical Journal and they can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14300 and here https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14301.
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