A new space telescope has detailed mind-blowing details about a supermassive black hole and a supernova remnant.
The XRISM mission revealed that the temperature of the supernova’s iron ions reaches 10 billion degrees Celsius.
It also determined the inner radius of the doughnut-shaped torus of supermassive black hole NGC 4151 to be approximately 0.1 light-years – or about 946 billion kilometres.
The mass of this black hole is estimated to be about 30 million times that of the Sun.
Astronomers presented the first scientific results of the new X-ray telescope recently, less than a year after the telescope’s launch.
In these first published results, XRISM, a mission led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with participation from ESA, shows its unique capabilities to reveal the speed and temperature of sizzling hot gas, called plasma, and the three-dimensional structures of material surrounding a black hole and an exploded star.
In one of its “first light” observations, XRISM focused on N132D, a supernova remnant located in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years from Earth.
This interstellar ‘bubble’ of hot gas was expelled by the explosion of a very massive star approximately 3,000 years ago.
XRISM has also shed new light on the mysterious structure surrounding a supermassive black hole. Focusing on the spiral galaxy NGC 4151, located 62 million light-years away from us, XRISM’s observations offer an unprecedented view of the material very close to the galaxy’s central black hole.
“These new observations provide crucial information in understanding how black holes grow by capturing surrounding matter, and offer a new insight into the life and death of massive stars. They showcase the mission’s exceptional capability in exploring the high-energy Universe,” says ESA XRISM Project Scientist Matteo Guainazzi.
