A famous supermassive black hole observed with the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS
Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - 06:11
in Astronomy & Space
Cygnus A is an elliptical galaxy around 600 million light years from the Earth, which has a supermassive black hole at its centre. It is one of the brightest sources of radio waves in the sky and was featured in Contact, the famous science fiction novel by Carl Sagan, which was made into a film. It has an active galactic nucleus, which means that the black hole is "swallowing" material from its surroundings. When this occurs, strong electromagnetic radiation is produced, as well as large jets of particles, which are emitted from the galactic nucleus at near the speed of light, traveling beyond the edge of the galaxy and reaching three hundred thousand light years into the intergalactic medium.