Galactic fountain
27 Nov 2018 by Evoluted New Media
An international team of scientists has observed plumes of cold molecular gas sprayed out by a black hole a billion light-years from Earth. The team say this is the first clear and compelling evidence of galaxy formation in action. At the centre of the galaxy, named Abell 2597, the black hole is drawing in vast stores of cold molecular gas and then spraying them back out again in an ongoing cycle. “The supermassive black hole at the centre of this giant galaxy acts like a mechanical ‘pump’ in a water fountain,” said Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
