Two mysterious bubbles of hot gas emerge from a giant “burp” of a supermassive black hole. This was reported by a team led by John Orlowski-Scherer of the University of Pennsylvania, using data from the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia. Like the workgroup writes in their publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, the bubbles formed when the black hole at the center of the MS0735 galaxy cluster absorbed a large amount of matter. For a short time it produced powerful jets, beams of highly accelerated matter, which blew hot gas into the area. To the researchers’ surprise, the bubbles remained stable after the jets shut down.
To find out why, the team looked inside the bubbles. To do this, the researchers analyzed how the cosmic microwave background is scattered around the black hole by electrons in the hot gas. Specifically, they looked at factors besides the prevailing temperature in the bubbles, which might also be counteracting the surrounding gas pressure. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that a significant contribution to this back pressure comes from particles whose momentum is not exclusively due to their thermal motion. These include particles near the speed of light and other high-energy radiation that have been accelerated by shock waves, for example, but also turbulent eddies in bubble gas and particles that are accelerated along magnetic fields.
The fact that this additional kinetic energy is sufficient to keep structures recognizable by their intense radio radiation stable for long periods of time is due to the enormous violence of the original burst of energy. As a result, an unusually large number of high-energy processes are occurring in bubbles to date. “We are seeing one of the most energetic explosions ever observed from supermassive black holes,” said Orlowski-Scherer according to a press release from the Green Bank Observatory.
