When astronomers saw a particularly bright flash of light in space earlier this year, they naturally wondered why. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other institutions around the world say yes. complete puzzles. Flash – brighter than 1000 trillion suns – comes from a flurry of material released by a Giant black hole. They say that the black hole most likely devours the star. The flash of light was very bright as the plane was heading towards the ground.
Obviously there is no danger. The black hole and its rays are located far from our galaxy, the Milky Way, in the depths of space, about 8.5 km away. Billions light years from the earth.
Researcher published News of their discovery in a new way Peer review card inside natural astronomy November 30, 2022. Free newspaper pre-printing is also available Available on arXiv.
Mysterious lightning
Astronomers at NASA, Caltech and elsewhere have used it Zwicky Transit FacilityAll-sky survey at the Palomar Observatory in California to detect the flash. Using several telescopes, astronomers observed X-ray, ultraviolet, optical and radio bursts of light wavelength range. Astronomers have called the flash AT 2022cmc.
Astronomers have already seen black holes gobble up stars. Catastrophic events are called that tidal disruption events (AND IT’S). A black hole’s tidal power is so strong that it can tear apart stars if they get too close.
However, on the 2022cc it feels a bit unique. It was the brightest TDE recorded to date, as well as the furthest, a 8.5 billion light years. That’s more than half of the known universe!
The black hole’s jets are directed towards the Earth
But why are these tidal disturbance events so bright? Astronomers say that when a black hole starts eating a star, it ejects a very large one relative jet of material. This in itself is unusual. But in this case, the plane was heading towards the ground. This can cause tidal disturbance events to appear brighter than normal. Scientists call it Doppler enhancement, or Relativity. And as a reminder, there’s no danger, because black holes are at the center of the universe. However, the amount of energy released by the aircraft is enormous.
Another astronomer from the University of Birmingham used the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to observe AT 2022cmc. They realized that the parent galaxy was much further away than previously thought. Therefore Matthew Nicol at the University of Birmingham he said:
Our spectrum tells us that the source is hot: about 30,000 degrees, which is typical for TDE. But we also see the absorption of light by the galaxies where these events occur. These absorption lines shift dramatically towards red wavelengths, telling us that this galaxy is much more distant than we thought!
So far, astronomers have previously discovered three other Doppler-enhanced tidal disturbance events. DI 2022cmc was also the first to be discovered during a sky survey.
feeding process
The researchers observed the light signal using Explorer of the internal structure of neutron stars (NICER) active telescope International Space Station. This telescope sees the universe in X-rays, not visible light. At first, astronomers thought the flash might be a gamma ray burst. However, as the main author Dheeraj Basham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he said:
Everything seemed pretty normal for the first three days. Then we looked at it through an X-ray telescope, and what we found was that the source was very bright. This particular event is 100 times more powerful than the strongest gamma-ray flare. It’s something extraordinary.
This discovery sheds light (literally!) on tidal disturbance events and how supermassive black holes form. Co-author Matthew Luccinia Postdoctoral level He told MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research:
We know that there is only one supermassive black hole in every galaxy, and they formed very rapidly in the first million years of the universe. This tells us that they feed very quickly, although we don’t know how this feeding process works. Therefore, a resource like TDE can actually be a good investigation into how this process came about.
At 2022 cm it is very bright in X-ray wavelengths. In addition, astronomers have also noted that it varies by a factor of up to 500 over several weeks.
A vortex of debris around a black hole
What is the reason for this large amount of X-ray energy? The researchers said it was an “episode of extreme accumulation”. Basically, during a tidal disturbance event, the star creates a vortex of matter as the black hole tears it apart. This disk generates a large amount of energy.
In the case of AT 2022cmc, as is often the case, there is also an outflow of matter from the black hole. Astronomers want to know how fast the spacecraft is moving, generating a lot of energy and causing bright flashes. The answer turned out to be as fast as possible. Lucini said:
We found that the speed of the jet is 99.99 percent of the speed of light.
Very pleasant! It’s so fast.
Black holes are most likely in a state of food surplus, as Basham points out:
Many tidal disturbances occur early, and we can detect these events early, within a week of the black hole starting devouring the star.
Astronomers hope to find more tidal disturbance events. Lucini said:
We expect more EFTs of this type in the future. So we can say, finally, how exactly the black hole releases this powerful emission.
Bottom line: An international team of astronomers claims to have detected the most powerful jet of material ever emitted from a black hole, 8.5 billion light-years away. It’s aimed directly at Earth.
Source: Birth of a relativistic jet after a star is destroyed by a cosmic black hole
Through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
through the University of Birmingham
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