by Astronomers have revealed an entirely new type of black hole behavior in a supermassive black hole.
In 2020, a previously quiescent black hole at the heart of a galaxy about 800 million light-years from Earth, with a mass equal to 50 million suns, suddenly erupted, outshining the surrounding matter by a factor of 1,000.
A team of researchers think that these periodic eruptions are the result of a second smaller black hole slamming into a disk of gas and dust, or “accretionary disk,” around the supermassive black hole, causing it to repeat itself ” iccup” out content.
The results challenge the conventional picture of how black hole accretion discs function. Previously, scientists believed they were uniform disks of gas and dust rotating around a central black hole. However, the new results suggest that some accretion discs may contain exotic components, such as stars and even smaller secondary black holes.
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“This is a different beast. It doesn’t fit anything that we know about these systems. We thought we knew a lot about black holes, but this is telling us that there are a lot more things that they can do,” study team member Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, said in a statement.
“We think there will be many more systems like this, and we just need to take more data to find them,” Pasham said.
Hunting a ‘different beast’ black hole system
The team first became aware of this black hole while examining data from the Automated All Sky Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN), a network of 20 telescopes around the globe that scan the entire sky on Earth at once. heels.
As ASAS-SN automatically scanned the sky in December 2020, the robotic telescopes spotted a burst of light in a previously quiet patch of sky containing a galaxy located about 800 million light-years away. Pasham spotted this flare using the Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), NASA’s X-ray telescope on the International Space Station (ISS).
Pasham had little time left to use the ISS-based telescope, which is used to search the cosmos for X-ray bursts from neutron stars, black holes, and other extreme gravitational phenomena, meaning that he had to act fast and get it. good luck
“It was either use it or lose it, and it turned out to be my luckiest break,” said Pasham.
The researcher saw that this galaxy continued to burn, and that it lasted about four months. In the NICER observations of this flare, Pasham observed a curious pattern of subtle drops in X-rays and burst energy every 8.5 days. The signal was almost like the dip of light that occurs when an exoplanet crosses or “crosses” the face of its star, briefly blocking its starlight.
“I was scratching my head as to what this means, because this pattern doesn’t fit anything we know about these systems,” said Pasham.
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Pasham’s confusion was eased when he discovered from research that suggested that a medium-sized black hole, a black hole with a mass between 100 and 10,000 times the mass of the sun, could orbit a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy.
This smaller black hole could be orbiting its larger counterpart so that it drifts in and out of the supermassive black hole’s accretion disk. As it punches through this gas and dust, the black hole slams down smaller plumes of gas. Each dive would create another plume, thus the periodic pattern of “hiccups.”
If those plumes are directed toward Earth, they could be seen as a sudden drop in energy from the system in question as light from the accretion disk is periodically obscured, just as starlight is by a transiting exoplanet.
“I was very impressed with this theory, and I immediately sent them an email saying, ‘I think we’re looking at exactly what your theory predicts’,” said Pasham.
This prompted the authors of that initial research to create simulations incorporating NICER data. These confirmed that the observed 8.5-day signal is likely the result of a small black hole piercing through the accretion disk of its supermassive black hole companion.
What caused the supermassive black hole to form? Too much spaghetti
This still doesn’t explain why the supermassive black hole suddenly erupted, however – just why this explosion is periodically reduced. The team think that this black hole burst was caused by a star passing too close to its outer boundary recently or “event gap”.
The enormous gravitational influence of the supermassive black hole would generate enormous tidal forces as they approach stars, stretching them vertically and squeezing them horizontally, in a process known as “spaghettification”. This would result in the star being shredded in the event of a tidal break, causing a powerful burst of light and a sudden influx of material that brightened the accretion disk.
In the case of the newly observed galaxy, the extra matter appears to have fed the supermassive black hole for four months, the duration of the burst, and also meant that when the smaller secondary black hole passed through this matter, it more plum flying. gas than usual.
“We are seeing evidence of objects entering and passing through the disc at different angles, challenging the traditional picture of a simple gaseous disc around a black hole,” said Pasham. “We think there’s a large population of these systems out there.”
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Richard Saxton is an X-ray astronomer from the European Astronomical Center in Madrid who was not involved in the research. He said the new results, and the technique used to achieve them, could help astronomers better understand supermassive black holes and the exotic environments they inhabit.
“This result indicates that very dense supermassive black hole binaries may be common in galactic nuclei, which is a very exciting development for future gravitational wave detectors,” Saxton said in a statement. “This is a great example of how to use disturbed star debris to illuminate the otherwise dark interior of a galactic nucleus. It’s like using fluorescent dye to find a leak in a pipe .”
The team’s research was published on Wednesday (March 27) in the journal Science Advances.
