Chandra Release - January 10, 2008

Visual Description: Spinning Black Holes Survey (NGC 4374)

Four images of galaxies with rapidly spinning black holes at their centers are presented in this Chandra montage at left. Colored in light blue, the shapes of these objects are irregular but slightly circular or oval-shaped, with bright spots in the centers. These Chandra images also show pairs of huge bubbles, or cavities, in the hot gaseous atmospheres of the galaxies. These are created in each case by jets produced by a central supermassive black hole. On the right is an artist’s illustration in dark reds and a pop of orange and electric blue. The artist's impression shows gas within a "sphere of influence" falling straight inwards towards a black hole before joining a rapidly spinning disk of matter in orange, near the center. Most of the material in the disk is swallowed by the black hole, but some of it is swept outwards in jets (colored electric blue) by quickly spinning magnetic fields close to the black hole.