Supermassive Black Holes: What Quasars Really Are

Observational Evidence for Black Holes

In order to prove that a black hole is present at the center of a galaxy, we must demonstrate that so much mass is crammed into so small a volume that no normal objects—massive stars or clusters of stars—could possibly account for it (just as we did for the black hole in the Milky Way). We already know from observations (discussed in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime) that an accreting black hole is surrounded by a hot accretion disk with gas and dust that swirl around the black hole before it falls in.

If we assume that the energy emitted by quasars is also produced by a hot accretion disk, then, as we saw in the previous section, the size of the disk must be given by the time the quasar energy takes to vary. For quasars, the emission in visible light varies on typical time scales of 5 to 2000 days, limiting the size of the disk to that many light-days.

In the X-ray band, quasars vary even more rapidly, so the light travel time argument tells us that this more energetic radiation is generated in an even smaller region. Therefore, the mass around which the accretion disk is swirling must be confined to a space that is even smaller. If the quasar mechanism involves a great deal of mass, then the only astronomical object that can confine a lot of mass into a very small space is a black hole. In a few cases, it turns out that the X-rays are emitted from a region just a few times the size of the black hole event horizon.

The next challenge, then, is to “weigh” this central mass in a quasar. In the case of our own Galaxy, we used observations of the orbits of stars very close to the galactic center, along with Kepler’s third law, to estimate the mass of the central black hole (The Milky Way Galaxy). In the case of distant galaxies, we cannot measure the orbits of individual stars, but we can measure the orbital speed of the gas in the rotating accretion disk. The Hubble Space Telescope is especially well suited to this task because it is above the blurring of Earth’s atmosphere and can obtain spectra very close to the bright central regions of active galaxies. The Doppler effect is then used to measure radial velocities of the orbiting material and so derive the speed with which it moves around.

One of the first galaxies to be studied with the Hubble Space Telescope is our old favorite, the giant elliptical M87. Hubble Space Telescope images showed that there is a disk of hot (10,000 K) gas swirling around the center of M87 (Figure 27.8). It was surprising to find hot gas in an elliptical galaxy because this type of galaxy is usually devoid of gas and dust. But the discovery was extremely useful for pinning down the existence of the black hole. Astronomers measured the Doppler shift of spectral lines emitted by this gas, found its speed of rotation, and then used the speed to derive the amount of mass inside the disk—applying Kepler’s third law.

Figure 27.8 Evidence for a Black Hole at the Center of M87. (a) The disk of whirling gas at right was discovered at the center of the giant elliptical galaxy M87 with the Hubble Space Telescope. Observations made on opposite sides of the disk show that one side is approaching us (the spectral lines are blueshifted by the Doppler effect) while the other is receding (lines redshifted), a clear indication that the disk is rotating. The rotation speed is about 550 kilometers per second or 1.2 million miles per hour. Such a high rotation speed is evidence that there is a very massive black hole at the center of M87. (b) By 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope, a collaborative venture among radio telescopes spanning our planet, was able to produce the first radio image of the shadow of the M87 black hole on the accretion disk surrounding it. This was taken with radio waves, so color is arbitrary. The shadow is about 2 ½ times as big as the event horizon of the supermassive black hole. (credit (a): modification of work by Holland Ford, STScI/JHU; Richard Harms, Linda Dressel, Ajay K. Kochhar, Applied Research Corp.; Zlatan Tsvetanov, Arthur Davidsen, Gerard Kriss, Johns Hopkins; Ralph Bohlin, George Hartig, STScI; Bruce Margon, University of Washington in Seattle; NASA; credit (b): modification of work by European Southern Observatory (ESO), Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration)

Modern estimates show that there is a mass of at least 3.5 billion M_Sun concentrated in a tiny region at the very center of M87. So much mass in such a small volume of space must be a black hole. Let’s stop for a moment and take in this figure: a single black hole that has swallowed enough material to make 3.5 billion stars like the Sun. Few astronomical measurements have ever led to so mind-boggling a result. What a strange environment the neighborhood of such a supermassive black hole must be.

Another example is shown in Figure 27.9. Here, we see a disk of dust and gas that surrounds a 300-million-M_Sun black hole in the center of an elliptical galaxy. (The bright spot in the center is produced by the combined light of stars that have been pulled close together by the gravitational force of the black hole.) The mass of the black hole was again derived from measurements of the rotational speed of the disk. The gas in the disk is moving around at 155 kilometers per second at a distance of only 186 light-years from its center. Given the pull of the mass at the center, we expect that the whole dust disk should be swallowed by the black hole in several billion years.

Figure 27.9 Another Galaxy with a Black-Hole Disk. The ground-based image shows an elliptical galaxy called NGC 7052 located in the constellation of Vulpecula, almost 200 million light-years from Earth. At the galaxy’s center (right) is a dust disk roughly 3700 light-years in diameter. The disk rotates like a giant merry-go-round: gas in the inner part (186 light-years from the center) whirls around at a speed of 155 kilometers per second (341,000 miles per hour). From these measurements and Kepler’s third law, it is possible to estimate that the disk is orbiting around a central black hole with a mass of 300 million Suns. (credit: modification of work by Roeland P. van der Marel (STScI), Frank C. van den Bosch (University of Washington), NASA)

But do we have to accept black holes as the only explanation of what lies at the center of these galaxies? What else could we put in such a small space other than a giant black hole? The alternative is stars. But to explain the masses in the centers of galaxies without a black hole we need to put at least a million stars in a region the size of the solar system. To fit, they would have be only 2 star diameters apart. Collisions between stars would happen all the time. And these collisions would lead to mergers of stars, and very soon the one giant star that they form would collapse into a black hole. So there is really no escape: only a black hole can fit so much mass into so small a space.

As we saw earlier, observations now show that all the galaxies with a spherical concentration of stars—either elliptical galaxies or spiral galaxies with nuclear bulges (see the chapter on Galaxies)—harbor one of these giant black holes at their centers. Among them is our neighbor spiral galaxy, the Andromeda galaxy, M31. The masses of these central black holes range from a just under a million up to at least 30 billion times the mass of the Sun. Several black holes may be even more massive, but the mass estimates have large uncertainties and need verification. We call these black holes “supermassive” to distinguish them from the much smaller black holes that form when some stars die (see The Death of Stars). So far, the most massive black holes from stars—those detected through gravitational waves detected by LIGO—have masses of about 40 solar masses.

Energy Production around a Black Hole

By now, you may be willing to entertain the idea that huge black holes lurk at the centers of active galaxies. But we still need to answer the question of how such a black hole can account for one of the most powerful sources of energy in the universe. As we saw in Black Holes and Curved Spacetime, a black hole itself can radiate no energy. Any energy we detect from it must come from material very close to the black hole, but not inside its event horizon.

In a galaxy, a central black hole (with its strong gravity) attracts matter—stars, dust, and gas—orbiting in the dense nuclear regions. This matter spirals in toward the spinning black hole and forms an accretion disk of material around it. As the material spirals ever closer to the black hole, it accelerates and becomes compressed, heating up to temperatures of millions of degrees. Such hot matter can radiate prodigious amounts of energy as it falls in toward the black hole.

To convince yourself that falling into a region with strong gravity can release a great deal of energy, imagine dropping a printed version of your astronomy textbook out the window of the ground floor of the library. It will land with a thud, and maybe give a surprised pigeon a nasty bump, but the energy released by its fall will not be very great. Now take the same book up to the fifteenth floor of a tall building and drop it from there. For anyone below, astronomy could suddenly become a deadly subject; when the book hits, it does so with a great deal of energy.

Dropping things from far away into the much stronger gravity of a black hole is much more effective in turning the energy released by infall into other forms of energy. Just as the falling book can heat up the air, shake the ground, or produce sound energy that can be heard some distance away, so the energy of material falling toward a black hole can be converted to significant amounts of electromagnetic radiation.

What a black hole has to work with is not textbooks but streams of infalling gas. If a dense blob of gas moves through a thin gas at high speed, it heats up as it slows by friction. As it slows down, kinetic (motion) energy is turned into heat energy. Just like a spaceship reentering the atmosphere (Figure 27.10), gas approaching a black hole heats up and glows where it meets other gas. But this gas, as it approaches the event horizon, reaches speeds of 10% the speed of light and more. It therefore gets far, far hotter than a spaceship, which reaches no more than about 1500 K. Indeed, gas near a supermassive black hole reaches a temperature of about 150,000 K, about 100 times hotter than a spaceship returning to Earth. It can even get so hot—millions of degrees—that it radiates X-rays.

Figure 27.10 Friction in Earth’s Atmosphere. In this artist’s impression, the rapid motion of a spacecraft (the Apollo mission reentry capsule) through the atmosphere compresses and heats the air ahead of it, which heats the spacecraft in turn until it glows red hot. Pushing on the air slows down the spacecraft, turning the kinetic energy of the spacecraft into heat. Fast-moving gas falling into a quasar heats up in a similar way. (credit: modification of work by NASA)

The amount of energy that can be liberated this way is enormous. Einstein showed that mass and energy are interchangeable with his famous formula E = mc² (see The Sun: A Nuclear Powerhouse). A hydrogen bomb releases just 1% of that energy, as does a star. Quasars are much more efficient than that. The energy released falling to the event horizon of a black hole can easily reach 10% or, in the extreme theoretical limit, 32%, of that energy. (Unlike the hydrogen atoms in a bomb or a star, the gas falling into the black hole is not actually losing mass from its atoms to free up the energy; the energy is produced just because the gas is falling closer and closer to the black hole.) This huge energy release explains how a tiny volume like the region around a black hole can release as much power as a whole galaxy. But to radiate all that energy, instead of just falling inside the event horizon with barely a peep, the hot gas must take the time to swirl around the star in the accretion disk and emit some of its energy.

Most black holes don’t show any signs of quasar emission. We call them “quiescent.” But, like sleeping dragons, they can be woken up by being roused with a fresh supply of gas. Our own Milky Way black hole is currently quiescent, but it may have been a quasar just a few million years ago (Figure 27.11). Two giant bubbles that extend 25,000 light-years above and below the galactic center are emitting gamma rays. Were these produced a few million years ago when a significant amount of matter fell into the black hole at the center of the galaxy? Astronomers are still working to understand what remarkable event might have formed these enormous bubbles.

Figure 27.11 Fermi Bubbles in the Galaxy. Giant bubbles shining in gamma-ray light lie above and below the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, as seen by the Fermi satellite. (The gamma-ray and X-ray image is superimposed on a visible-light image of the inner parts of our Galaxy.) The bubbles may be evidence that the supermassive black hole at the center of our Galaxy was a quasar a few million years ago. (credit: modification of work by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)

The physics required to account for the exact way in which the energy of infalling material is converted to radiation near a black hole is far more complicated than our simple discussion suggests. To understand what happens in the “rough and tumble” region around a massive black hole, astronomers and physicists must resort to computer simulations (and they require supercomputers, fast machines capable of awesome numbers of calculations per second). The details of these models are beyond the scope of our book, but they support the basic description presented here.

Radio Jets

So far, our model seems to explain the central energy source in quasars and active galaxies. But, as we have seen, there is more to quasars and other active galaxies than the point-like energy source. They can also have long jets that glow with radio waves, light, and sometimes even X-rays, and that extend far beyond the limits of the parent galaxy. Can we find a way for our black hole and its accretion disk to produce these jets of energetic particles as well?

Many different observations have now traced these jets to within 3 to 30 light-years of the parent quasar or galactic nucleus. While the black hole and accretion disk are typically smaller than 1 light-year, we nevertheless presume that if the jets come this close, they probably originate in the vicinity of the black hole. Another characteristic of the jets we need to explain is that they contain matter moving close to the speed of light.

Why are energetic electrons and other particles near a supermassive black hole ejected into jets, and often into two oppositely directed jets, rather than in all directions? Again, we must use theoretical models and supercomputer simulations of what happens when a lot of material whirls inward in a crowded black hole accretion disk. Although there is no agreement on exactly how jets form, it has become clear that any material escaping from the neighborhood of the black hole has an easier time doing so perpendicular to the disk.

In some ways, the inner regions of black hole accretion disks resemble a baby that is just learning to eat by herself. As much food as goes into the baby’s mouth can sometimes wind up being spit out in various directions. In the same way, some of the material whirling inward toward a black hole finds itself under tremendous pressure and orbiting with tremendous speed. Under such conditions, simulations show that a significant amount of material can be flung outward—not back along the disk, where more material is crowding in, but above and below the disk. If the disk is thick (as it tends to be when a lot of material falls in quickly), it can channel the outrushing material into narrow beams perpendicular to the disk (Figure 27.12).

Figure 27.12 Models of Accretion Disks. These schematic drawings show what accretion disks might look like around large black holes for (a) a thin accretion disk and (b) a “fat” disk—the type needed to account for channeling the outflow of hot material into narrow jets oriented perpendicular to the disk.

Figure 27.13 shows observations of an elliptical galaxy that behaves in exactly this way. At the center of this active galaxy, there is a ring of dust and gas about 400 light-years in diameter, surrounding a 1.2-billion-M_Sun black hole. Radio observations show that two jets emerge in a direction perpendicular to the ring, just as the model predicts.

Figure 27.13 Jets and Disk in an Active Galaxy. The picture on the left shows the active elliptical galaxy NGC 4261, which is located in the Virgo Cluster at a distance of about 100 million light-years. The galaxy itself—the white circular region in the center—is shown the way it looks in visible light, while the jets are seen at radio wavelengths. A Hubble Space Telescope image of the central portion of the galaxy is shown on the right. It contains a ring of dust and gas about 800 light-years in diameter, surrounding a supermassive black hole. Note that the jets emerge from the galaxy in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the ring. (credit: modification of work by ESA/HST)

With this black hole model, we have come a long way toward understanding the quasars and active galaxies that seemed very mysterious only a few decades ago. As often happens in astronomy, a combination of better instruments (making better observations) and improved theoretical models enabled us to make significant progress on a puzzling aspect of the cosmos.