Chandra Release - June 21, 2018

Visual Description: Mrk 1216

The main panel of this graphic is an artist's illustration of a supermassive black hole and there is an inset containing an X-ray image of the red nugget galaxy Mrk 1216. The center of the illustration is dominated by a large, swirling black hole surrounded by an accretion disk and shows material falling towards black holes that can be redirected outward at high speeds due to intense gravitational and magnetic fields. These high-speed jets can tamp down the formation of stars. This happens because the blasts from the vicinity of the black hole provide a powerful source of heat, preventing the galaxy's hot interstellar gas from cooling enough to allow large numbers of stars to form. The X-ray inset with data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is a small clump of red. A study using Chandra data indicates that black holes have squelched star formation in small, yet massive galaxies known as "red nuggets". The results suggest some red nugget galaxies may have used some of the untapped stellar fuel to grow their central supermassive black holes to unusually massive proportions.