{"id":26,"date":"2022-01-19T12:11:19","date_gmt":"2022-01-19T12:11:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/?page_id=26"},"modified":"2022-01-24T16:31:27","modified_gmt":"2022-01-24T16:31:27","slug":"the-research","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/the-research\/","title":{"rendered":"The Research"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This project is linked to the research of Prof. Ian McHardy in the astronomy group<\/a> at the University of Southampton (UoS). Ian’s research area focuses on Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN), these are supermassive black holes that exist at the centres of galaxies and are very active. When we say ‘very active’ we mean they have features like an accretion disc and\/or jet and these extreme environments give off radiation with wavelengths spanning the whole electromagnetic spectrum. Dr Sadie Jones’ PhD research at UoS was also on AGN, specifically in understanding these mysterious objects by using a combination of radio, X-ray and optical telescopes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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credit: NASA <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The most massive of black holes are the masses of over a million Suns and live at the centre of galaxies.\u00a0Our Milky way galaxy has a black hole the size of 4 million Suns. And some galaxies have very bright\u00a0centres and this is because they have very \u2018active\u2019 supermassive blackholes, we call these\u00a0Active Galactic Nuclei or AGN. For these blackholes astronomers have worked out that there is a disc of\u00a0material that swirls around the black hole which is called an accretion disc and there is a corona, that\u00a0scientists still don\u2019t know the exact shape of.\u00a0<\/p>

Even massive telescopes like Hubble are not powerful enough to see the visible light from these discs.\u00a0However, we can see the X-ray light from the accretion disc and the corona using our X-ray\u00a0Telescopes, which are up above the Earth, in space.\u00a0<\/p>

Some active galaxies also have jets which we are think are launched near the event horizon of the black\u00a0hole. We see these jets because they give of radio waves that we detect using large radio dishes that are all\u00a0connected via the internet. It\u2019s possible that the disc \/corona and jet regions are linked by the same energy\u00a0reservoir. In other words, if energy goes into the X-rays, it must be taken away from the radio.\u00a0<\/p>

The way to understand where the light is coming from is to study radio and X- ray light curve graphsfrom these active supermassive blackholes and look for a relationship between them.\u00a0<\/p>

If X-rays are emitted from the corona around the black hole, they will travel outwards and hit the\u00a0surrounding material, where they will be re-emitted as lower energy radiation and reverberate. By\u00a0measuring the time delay between the X-rays and the lower energy emission we can measure how far apart\u00a0the corona and jets are and learn about the dimensions of the supermassive black hole system.\u00a0<\/p>

Astronomers use X-ray telescopes in space and radio telescopes on the Earth to look at lots of different\u00a0AGNs. Then they collect all this data on lots of different black holes with many different masses and see if\u00a0they can see any patterns in the X-ray\/ radio relationship.\u00a0<\/p>Dr Sadie Jones & Prof Ian McHardy <\/cite><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This project is linked to the research of Prof. Ian McHardy in the astronomy group at the University of Southampton … More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5030,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-26","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry",""],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5030"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/26\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/bhpoetry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}