from the round-and-round-and-round-and-... dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
At the center of a galaxy called NGC 1068, a supermassive black hole hides within a thick doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas. When astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to study this cloud in more detail, they made an unexpected discovery that could explain why supermassive black holes grew so rapidly in the early Universe.
"Thanks to the spectacular resolution of ALMA, we measured the movement of gas in the inner orbits around the black hole," explains Violette Impellizzeri of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), working at ALMA in Chile and lead author on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal. "Surprisingly, we found two disks of gas rotating in opposite directions."
Supermassive black holes already existed when the Universe was young -- just a billion years after the Big Bang. But how these extreme objects, whose masses are up to billions of times the mass of the Sun, had time to grow in such a relatively short timespan, is an outstanding question among astronomers. This new ALMA discovery could provide a clue. "Counter-rotating gas streams are unstable, which means that clouds fall into the black hole faster than they do in a disk with a single rotation direction," said Impellizzeri. "This could be a way in which a black hole can grow rapidly."
[...]Impellizzeri and her team used ALMA's superior zoom lens ability to observe the molecular gas around the black hole. Unexpectedly, they found two counter-rotating disks of gas. The inner disk spans 2-4 light-years and follows the rotation of the galaxy, whereas the outer disk (also known as the torus) spans 4-22 light-years and is rotating the opposite way.
"We did not expect to see this, because gas falling into a black hole would normally spin around it in only one direction," said Impellizzeri. "Something must have disturbed the flow, because it is impossible for a part of the disk to start rotating backward all on its own."
Journal Reference:
C. M. Violette Impellizzeri, Jack F. Gallimore, Stefi A. Baum, Moshe Elitzur, Richard Davies, Dieter Lutz, Roberto Maiolino, Alessandro Marconi, Robert Nikutta, Christopher P. O’Dea, Eleonora Sani. Counter-rotation and High-velocity Outflow in the Parsec-scale Molecular Torus of NGC 1068. The Astrophysical Journal, 2019; 884 (2): L28 DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab3c64
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 17 2019, @06:05PM (2 children)
That the solar system, and galaxy, all rotates predominantly in one direction is likely a matter of random chance - the progenitor sources of matter and energy likely spun in random directions, with just a little extra kick in the spin that made our planets.
99.85ish% of the mass in our Solar system ended up at the bottom of the local gravity well, in the sun. All the planets and moons, including Jupiter, Saturn, etc. make up just 0.15% of the local mass.
Current estimates of the Milky Way's central black hole (Sagittarius A) are more modest at around 4x10^6 solar masses vs 5.5x10^10 solar masses for the whole galaxy.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @06:10PM (1 child)
They all rotate clockwise. You're looking at it wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 17 2019, @06:23PM
Depends which way up the clock is, i hear up north of sag-A, they all spin anti-clockwise, bruvva.
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Thursday October 17 2019, @09:29PM
those dual prop turbojet engines? The props run in opposite directions (Why is that? Stability?)
Regardless, somebody's planning on taking a really long trip.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday October 18 2019, @06:58AM
This must be like when you're trying to clean off a rust bubble with a wire wheel, but the wheel has become dull (all the wires are bent the other way, etc.) and it will barely even scratch the paint. So you reverse the direction of the wire wheel and now it eats the paint, rust, and everything in an instant, sending sparks everywhere.