by Astronomers have discovered one of the most powerful black hole eruptions ever seen – and this massive explosion, which took place nearly 4 billion years ago, created a pattern of stars in jewelry-like clusters.
The star necklace is decorated with a huge cluster made of hundreds of galaxies called SDSS J1531; this body is located about 3.8 billion light years from Earth. The galaxy cluster also contains a huge reservoir of hot gas, and at its core, two of its largest galaxies are merging into one. The scientists picked up an eruption that probably came from the supermassive black hole in one of the colliding galaxies.
And as these galaxies continue their way towards breaking together, the scientists were able to make out an S-shaped string of 19 massive star clusters called “superclusters”.
To investigate the formation of the supercluster string, astronomers from around the globe turned to a wealth of data related to the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio wave data from the Low Frequency Array radio telescope (LOFAR), and light data visible and X-ray. collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The creation of this incredible feature could lead to a better picture of how supermassive black holes shape the environments around them.
“Black hole eruptions, like the one that helped form the clusters in SDSS J1531, are predicted to be very important in keeping the gas in galaxy clusters hot,” Timothy Davis, a member of the research team and a scientist at Cardiff University , said in a statement. “Such clear evidence of this ongoing process provides our ability to understand the impact of supermassive black holes on their environments.”
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Unlikely heavenly jewelers
Supermassive black holes millions, or even billions, of times the size of the sun are believed to reside in the hearts of all large galaxies.
While many of these cosmic monsters lie quietly, like Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) at the heart of the Milky Way, others feed ferociously on gas, dust and even the stars around them. These supermassive black holes are part of what are known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), surrounded by disks of gas and dust that feed them. These discs are called accredited discs. The massive gravitational influences of these actively feeding black holes create turbulent conditions in their respective accretion disks, causing the environment to glow brightly.
In addition, powerful magnetic fields force any material that does not enter the supermassive black hole to the poles of the cosmic titan. Here, these charged particles are accelerated to speeds approaching the speed of light, erupting as highly aligned relativistic jets from the two poles of the black hole. This eruption is usually accompanied by a burst of electromagnetic radiation over a range of light wavelengths.
As a result, AGNs and their associated quasars are often so bright that they block out the combined light of all the stars in the galaxies around them.
As the jet erupting from one of the massive galaxies at the heart of SDSS J1531 pushes out, the team says they plow hot gas from the black hole. The team behind this research think that such activity created a huge cavity around the void.
“We are already seeing this system as it was four billion years ago, not long after Earth formed,” team leader and Harvard Center for Astrophysics researcher Osase Omoruyi said in the statement. “This ancient cavity, a fossil of the black hole, tells us about a key event that happened almost 200 million years earlier in the history of the cluster.”
Recreating this violent sequence of events with Chandra, Omoruyi and his colleagues tracked the movements of the dense gas near the core of SDSS J1531. This revealed bright X-ray “wings” at the edge of the cavity. Radio wave data from LOFAR revealed to the team the remnants of energetic particles attached to the erupting jet, the “smoking gun” evidence of this ancient, powerful eruption.
“It’s clear that this system has a very active black hole, which is repeatedly collapsing and strongly perturbing the gas around it,” Davis said. “Here, we find the smoking gun and we see its impact all at once.”
The flash energy of this jet is one of the highest ever recorded, Omoruyi explained in a blog for Harvard that the jet released 100,000 trillion times more energy than the sun will have over its entire lifetime.
“As the jet propagated through space, it carved a giant bubble in the cooling gas, lifting and dispersing the surrounding material,” she continued. “Despite almost 200 million years ago, the legacy of the spark lives on. The previously elevated gas has now cooled and is gravitating back towards the center of the cluster, providing the fresh fuel for the Star-shaped young ‘beads on a string’.”
Omoruyi added that while the discovery of this powerful outflow is surprising in itself, one of the most remarkable things about this observation is that the overall cluster remains stable.
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What the team has yet to find is evidence of a second powerful jet that would have erupted in the opposite direction and from the opposite pole of the supermassive black hole. The researchers think that evidence for these twin jets could be found in X-ray emissions and radio waves and would warrant further investigation.
“We think the evidence we have for this massive eruption is strong, but more observations with Chandra and LOFAR would add to the case,” Omoruyi concluded. “We hope to learn more about the origin of the cavity we have already seen and find the one expected on the other side of the black hole.”
The team’s research is published on the arXiv paper repository and has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.
