An international research team led by Associate Professor Takuma Izumi (Associate Professor at that time) of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has observed the Circinus Galaxy at extremely high resolution using the ALMA telescope. As a result, the team clearly captured the accretionary flow toward the supermassive black hole and revealed that the accretionary flow is caused by a physical mechanism called “gravitational instability". Furthermore, it was found that most of the accretion flow is not used for the growth of the black hole, but is instead ejected as atomic or molecular gas from the vicinity of the black hole, and then returns to the gas disk to become accretion flow to the black hole again, as if a fountain-like gas cycle is occurring. This is an important achievement for understanding the growth mechanism of supermassive black holes.
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Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), T. Izumi et al.
