Astronomers have observed features on the brink of an active black hole that appear unprecedented in previous data.
According to RCO News Agency, An international team of astronomers using data from NASA and other space agencies’ missions to investigate a supermassive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy has identified features that have never been seen before. These features include the ejection of a burst of plasma at nearly one-third the speed of light and unusual and rapid fluctuations of X-rays, possibly from near the edge of the black hole.
According to NASA, The source of this eruption is a galaxy named “1ES 1927+654”, which is located 270 million light years from Earth in the constellation “Draco”. This central black hole has a mass equal to 1.4 million suns.
“The black hole began changing its properties right before our eyes in 2018 with a burst of light, ultraviolet and X-rays,” said Eileen Meyer, an associate professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore (UMBC). Many research groups have been closely monitoring this black hole ever since.
After the eruption, it seemed that the black hole returned to a quiet state of activity for about a year, but by April 2023, a group of researchers led by Sibasish Laha, a researcher at the University of Maryland in Baltimore and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, increased They observed low-energy X-ray continuously and for several months.
The increase in X-rays has prompted researchers to look at new radio observations that indicate a strong and highly unusual radio beam is at work.
Radio data obtained in February, April, and May 2024 show that these rays are the result of outbursts of ionized gas, or plasma, extending from both sides of the black hole, and their total size is about half a light year. Astronomers have long wondered why only a fraction of supermassive black holes produce powerful bursts of plasma. These new observations may provide vital clues.
“The ejection of an eruption from a black hole has never been seen in real time before,” Meyer noted. We believe that the outflow started earlier; That is, when the X-rays increased and the eruption was pushed away from our view by the hot gas until it exploded early last year.
This research was published in “The Astrophysical Journal Letters”.
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