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Tiny galaxies reveal secrets of supermassive black holes
- swamp40 5y agoThis is pretty neat. The radiation was a tell-tale sign of iron atoms that had been so battered that they lost nine electrons — the so-called “Fe X” (or “Iron 10”) line. The researchers checked another candidate and found the same trait. While neither object had the traditional appearance of a feeding black hole, it was hard to imagine what else could be doing such violence to iron atoms.
- Sniffnoy 5y agoHm, there's no explanation in the article as to why having lost nine electrons would make it iron 10... anybody know what's going on here?
- gzer0 5y agoThis work highlights the power of coronal line emission to find black holes (BH) in dwarf galaxies missed by other selection techniques and to probe the BH population in bluer, lower-mass dwarf galaxies. This is one of the papers that the article could be based off of [1]. [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac1ffa https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac1ffa