A new discovery made by scientists observing a supermassive black hole located in the centre of the Ciricinus galaxy via the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) may offer new ground-breaking insight into the nature of these enigmatic phenomena, The Daily Express reports.
"Previous theoretical models set prior assumptions of rigid donuts. Rather than starting from assumptions, our simulation started from the physical equations and showed for the first time that the gas circulation naturally forms a donut," Keiichi Wada, a theoretical physics professor at Kagoshima University said.
He also noted that this discovery will essentially "rewrite the astronomy textbooks."
"By investigating the motion and distribution of both the cold molecular gas and warm atomic gas with ALMA, we demonstrated the origin of the so-called ‘donut’ structure around active black holes," Wada surmised. "Based on this discovery, we need to rewrite the astronomy textbooks."
