Using data from NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) satellite, an international team has uncovered a dozen instances where X-ray signals from active galaxies dimmed as a result of a cloud of gas moving across our line of sight. The new study triples the number of cloud events previously identified in the 16-year archive.
The study is the first statistical survey of the environments around supermassive black holes and is the longest-running AGN-monitoring study yet performed in X-rays. Scientists determined various properties of the occulting clouds, which vary in size and shape but average 4 billion miles (6.5 billion km) across – greater than Pluto's distance from the sun — and twice the mass of Earth. They orbit a few light-weeks to a few light-years from the black hole.", "items": [], "extra_data": {} }, { "id": 341749, "url": "https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/11482/#media_group_341749", "widget": "Video player", "title": "", "caption": "", "description": "Zoom into the cloudy heart of an active galaxy. This animation shows an artist's rendition of the cloudy structure revealed by a study of data from NASA's Rossi X-Ray Timing Explorer satellite.
Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Wolfgang Steffen, UNAM
Watch this video on the NASAgovVideo YouTube channel.
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