Eruptions from enormous black holes aren't uncommon. The explosions are powered by the release of pent-up energy in encircling disks of hot gas. But the team notes that this newfound eruption is thousands of times more powerful than most.
The source of the eruption was a beast of a galaxy at the center of the Ophiuchus cluster, a gathering of galaxies nearly 400 million light-years from Earth. In 2016, researchers noticed the edge of a cavity in the cluster's hot, X-ray emitting gas , about 400,000 light-years from the central galaxy. The excavated region appears to be over a million light-years across.
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The most enormous black hole explosion ever has now been observed
That something was a supermassive black hole quietly lurking in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster until it literally spilled all its guts. It was a boom so massive, the gas crater it left in its wake was easily the size of 15 Milky Ways. Simona Giacintucci of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and her research team recently observed it from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, which teamed up with a European space observatory and several ground telescopes to see this shocker.
What Happens in a Black Hole? | Discover Magazine
As objects and material are drawn into a black hole , they'll undergo a process evocatively called spaghettification . This is because gravity is so extreme and increasing so rapidly as you approach the black hole that your head and feet would experience drastically different gravitational environments. You would be physically stretched out, and your sense of time would slow to a crawl in the brief moments before you fell into the singularity, the zero-point of the black hole itself.
Black Hole Shredding a Star Leads to a New Astronomical Discovery
This computer-simulated image shows gas from a tidally shredded star falling into a black hole. Some of the gas also is being ejected at high speeds into space. Astronomers observed the flare in ultraviolet light using NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, and in optical light using the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Mount Haleakala, Hawaii. The light comes from gas falling into the black hole, and glowing helium from the star’s helium-rich gas expelled from the system.
All across the Universe, gigantic black holes are lurking in the dark within centers of galaxies. Like an ambush predator they patiently wait for unsuspecting stars to fly by, then use their overwhelming gravity to pull it apart into a spaghetti strand and finally swallow it up. Astronomers sometimes see this spectacle in visible light, sometimes in X-rays, but almost never in both types of light at the same time. Do black holes have two different ways of eating a star?
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This fundamental constant remains the same even near a black hole | Science News
According to standard physics, the fine-structure constant, which governs interactions of electrically charged particles, is the same everywhere in the universe. Some alternative theories, however, suggest that the constant might be different in certain locales, such as the extreme gravitational environment around a black hole.
The fine-structure constant is one of an assortment of unchanging numbers found in physics formulas, such as the mass of an electron or the speed of light. It determines the strength with which electrically charged particles pull on one another. Scientists don't know why it has the value it does — about 1/137. But its size seems crucial : If that number were much different, atoms wouldn't form ( SN: 11/2/16 ).
Our galaxy's huge black hole may have created organic molecules | New Scientist
These days, the black hole, known as Sagittarius A* , is relatively calm. But there are hints that millions of years ago it may have been much more active, swallowing down matter and spewing out high-energy radiation including large amounts of X-rays.
Student built instrument onboard NASA's OSIRIS-REx Spacecraft detects new Black Hole -
REXIS, a shoebox-sized student instrument, was designed to measure the X-rays that Bennu emits in response to incoming solar radiation. X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, like visible light, but with much higher energy.
This image shows the X-ray outburst from the black hole MAXI J0637-043, detected by the REXIS instrument on NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The image was constructed using data collected by the X-ray spectrometer while REXIS was making observations of the space around asteroid Bennu on Nov. 11, 2019. (NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/MIT/Harvard)
Bad Astronomy | Does our galaxy's huge black hole have a little black hole buddy?
In the center of our galaxy lies a huge black hole , so big we call it supermassive: It has the mass of four million times our Sun's. Called Sgr A* (literally spoken as "Sagittarius A star," or "Saj A star"), the evidence for it is overwhelming; we can see stars orbiting it , their positions changing over the course of years and in some cases months.
But… is it alone? Could there be a second black hole there, one less massive but still dizzyingly hefty, orbiting Sgr A* closely?
Happening on Twitter
"It turns out, the greatest lesson is to always be open to discovering the unexpected." While using an instrument o… https://t.co/vO3O0jPSKd NASA Fri Feb 28 20:30:07 +0000 2020
Supermassive black hole causes biggest explosion ever spotted in the universe https://t.co/igo2UrtB05 https://t.co/jZraQNYATl CBSNews (from New York, NY) Fri Feb 28 20:19:47 +0000 2020
Woo-hoo! Our student-built REXIS instrument detected X-rays radiating from a newly discovered black hole 🌑✨ This gi… https://t.co/MUPSaIBON8 OSIRISREx (from Asteroid Bennu) Fri Feb 28 19:27:41 +0000 2020
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