The study by an international team published in Nature Astronomy tells the discovery of a mysterious gamma-ray beating coming from a cloud of gas fed and synchronized with the black hole of the SS433 microquasar
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A research group made up of scientists from Germany, Spain, China and United States detected a mysterious beating of gamma rays, exactly like that of a heart, coming from a cloud of gas in the constellation of Aquila. The peculiarity is that the cloud, inconspicuous, pulsates with the same rhythm of a black hole a hundred light years away. The connection between the two celestial bodies, once observed, was brought back into one studio published in Nature Astronomy, but it remains a mystery how this is possible.
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The gas cloud is powered by the black hole
The black hole in question is adjacent to the microquasar SS433, in the Milky Way, 15,000 light years from Terra. These celestial bodies take their name from quasars, active galaxies, to which they are assimilated due to some common characteristics. The Ss433 microquasar, explain experts from the National Institute of Astrophysics (INAF), “consists of a giant star – whose mass is about 30 times the mass of the Sun – and a black hole of about 10-20 solar masses, which attracts and engulfs matter from giant star “. The precession of the black hole’s accretion disk pulsates over a period of approximately 162 days. Analysis by the team led by Jian Li of Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron Desy and Diego Torres of the Institute of Space Sciences detected a gamma signal with the same beat period from a location relatively far from the microquasar jets, labeled by scientists as Fermi J1913+0515, an insignificant cloud of gas at a distance of one hundred light years. “The coherent periods indicate that the emission of the gas cloud is fed by the microquasar,” writes INAF.
The connection remains a mystery
“Finding such a unique connection through timing, about a hundred light-years from the micro quasar and not along the direction of the jets, is as unexpected as it is surprising,” Li says, although still “the way the black hole feeds the pulsation evident in the cloud. of gas is not clear ”. “The accretion disk of the hole is not exactly in the plane of the orbit of the two objects – explains Torres. “It swings like a top, positioned tilted on a table, consequently the two jets spiral into the surrounding space, rather than forming a straight line” cconcludes the scientist.
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