Chandra Release - August 11, 2015

Visual Description: RGG 118

This image reveals a tiny heavyweight black hole located in the center of a dwarf disk galaxy, called RGG 118, about 340 million light years from Earth. The main panel is a Sloan Digital Sky Survey optical image of RGG 118, and there is an inset at upper right with a Chandra X-ray Observatory image of the galaxy's center. The X-ray point source, colored in purple, is produced by hot gas swirling around the black hole. The dominant colors in the optical image are greyish brown, blue and white, all on black.  The key structures in the optical image include a bright white spot in the center of the galaxy, with a couple fuzzy unstructured arms around it, surrounded by many smaller speckles or fuzzy dots.  Researchers used the Chandra data to figure out the brightness in X-rays of hot gas swirling toward the black hole. The outward push of radiation pressure of this hot gas is about 1% of the black hole's inward pull of gravity, matching the properties of other supermassive black holes.