* Astronomy

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RE: Markarian 509

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ESA spacecraft reveal new anatomy around a black hole

A fleet of spacecraft including ESA's XMM-Newton and Integral have shown unprecedented details close to a supermassive black hole. They reveal huge 'bullets' of gas being driven away from the 'gravitational monster'.
The black hole that the team chose to study lies at the heart of the galaxy Markarian 509, 500 million light years away in space. This black hole is colossal, containing 300 million times the mass of the Sun and growing more massive every day as it continues to feed.
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Astronomers reveal new findings from 'monster' black hole

Working as part of an international team, astronomers at the University of Southampton have revealed some striking features in the gases emitted from the regions close to one of the brightest, supermassive black holes known to man.
The results are published in the latest issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics journal.
The team, led by Dr Jelle Kaastra from the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, observed and mapped the environment around this 'monster' black hole, which is in the distant galaxy Markarian 509 and has a mass 300 million times that of the sun.
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Space Telescopes Reveal Secrets of Turbulent Black Hole

An international team of astronomers using five different telescopes has uncovered striking features around a supermassive black hole in the core of the distant galaxy Markarian 509. They found a very hot corona hovering above the black hole and cold gas "bullets" in hotter diffuse gas, speeding outward with velocities over 1 million miles per hour. This corona absorbs and reprocesses the ultraviolet light from the accretion disk encircling the black hole, energizing it and converting it into X-rays. This discovery allows astronomers to make sense of some of the observations of active galaxies that have been hard to explain so far. The heart of the campaign consisted of repeated visible, X-ray, and gamma-ray observations with ESA's XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL satellites, which monitored Markarian 509 for six weeks.
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Title: Suzaku Studies of Wide-Band Spectral Variability of the Bright Type I Seyfert Galaxy Markarian 509
Authors: Hirofumi Noda, Kazuo Makishima, Shin'ya Yamada, Shunsuke Torii, Soki Sakurai, Kazuhiro Nakazawa

The Type I Seyfert galaxy Markarian 509 was observed with Suzaku in 2010 November, for a gross time span of 2.2 days. Timing and spectral properties of the 0.5-45 keV X-rays, detected with the XIS and HXD, consistently revealed the presence of a soft spectral component that remained constant while the total X- ray intensity varied by ±10%. This stable soft component, found in the 0.5-3.0 keV range, was interpreted as a result of thermal Comptonisation in a corona with a temperature of ~ 0.5 keV and an optical depth of ~ 18. The time-avearged 0.5-45 keV Suzaku spectrum was reproduced successfully, as a combination of this thermal Comptonisation component, a harder power-law of photon index ~ 1.8, moderate reflection, and an iron K-emission line. By analysing four archival Suzaku datasets of the same object obtained in 2006, the thermal Comptonisation component, which was stable during the 2.2 day pointing in 2010, was found to vary on time scales of a few weeks, independently of the power-law component. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of the "multi-zone Comptonisation" view, obtained with Suzaku from the black hole binary Cygnus X-1.

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