A supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy could have a direct effect on the chemical distribution of its host galaxy, a new study suggests. This is another piece of the puzzle for understanding how galaxies evolve. It is well known that active supermassive black holes can cause significant changes in host galaxies by heating and removing interstellar gas within the galaxy. But the compact size of black holes, large distances from Earth, and dust obscuration in galaxies make it difficult to measure the distribution of the chemical composition of the gas around an active supermassive black hole.

In this study, an international team of researchers led by Toshiki Saito of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and Taku Nakajima of Nagoya University used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe Messier 77’s central region near 51.4 million light sources. used. -years away. In the direction of the Chinese constellation. Messier 77 is a relatively recent example of a galaxy with an active supermassive black hole. His work has been published at: Astrophysical Journal.

Thanks to ALMA’s high spatial resolution and new machine learning analysis technique, the team was able to map the distribution of 23 molecules. This is the first study to objectively describe the distribution of all detected molecules using unbiased observations.

The results show that along the path of the bipolar jets propagating near the black hole, molecules commonly found in galaxies such as carbon monoxide (CO) collapse, while concentrations of characteristic molecules such as the HCN isomer and the cyanide radical collapse. , (CN) increase. This is direct evidence that supermassive black holes affect not only the large-scale structure but also the chemical composition of their host galaxies. Source