Gravitational Lensing: Hubble Sees The Disk Around A Black Hole
Friday, November 4, 2011 - 03:30
in Astronomy & Space
Black holes are invisible but the forces they unleash cause some of the brightest phenomena in the Universe; quasars. The gravitational lensing effect of stars in a distant galaxy and the Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to observe a quasar accretion disk, the brightly glowing disk of matter that is slowly being sucked into its galaxy’s central black hole, which heat up and emit extremely bright radiation as they 'enter'.Result: Researchers were able to directly measure the disk’s size and plot the temperature across different parts of the disc; a level of precision equivalent to spotting individual grains of sand on the surface of the Moon. read more