For decades, scientists have suspected that some of the light that escapes from around massive black holes nearly doesn't make it — and now, they've finally seen it happen.
That's according to scientists who conducted a new analysis of old observations of a black hole feeding on a sunlike star. The researchers focused on measurements of the black hole's disk , where light escaping from the black hole shines. Specifically, the scientists teased apart, on the one hand, light that was coming directly from the disk, and on the other, light that failed to escape the disk and got pulled back toward the black hole before being reflected out into space.
Quite a lot has been going on:
Coronavirus stymied EHT a year after capturing first black hole image | Science News
The scientists behind the first picture of a black hole are squeezing everything they can from the data they've got.
A year after presenting a portrait of the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87 ( SN: 4/10/19 ), the Event Horizon Telescope team faces a two-year data drought, thanks to technical snafus, security snags and a global pandemic.
"The coronavirus has set us back a bit," says astrophysicist Shep Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., and the founding director of the EHT. "Nothing is immune, not even black holes."
Black hole shock: Scientists baffled by supermassive black hole sizes | Science | News |
At the heart of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole, which can have a mass billions of times that of the Sun. However, how these black holes came to be so huge remains a mystery, with astronomers offering up new theories.
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The biggest supermassive black holes have been devouring everything in their wake for upwards of 13 billion years when the Universe was still in its infancy.
When astronomers look back in time, they cannot find any stars or black holes big enough to form even the basis of some of the supermassive black holes which exist today.
Hubble Finds Best Evidence for Elusive Mid-Size Black Hole | ESA/Hubble
New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have provided the strongest evidence yet for mid-sized black holes in the Universe. Hubble confirms that this "intermediate-mass" black hole dwells inside a dense star cluster.
IMBHs are hard to find. "Intermediate-mass black holes are very elusive objects, and so it is critical to carefully consider and rule out alternative explanations for each candidate. That is what Hubble has allowed us to do for our candidate," said Dacheng Lin of the University of New Hampshire, principal investigator of the study 1 .
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New black hole study proves a 40-year-old theory - SlashGear
A black hole creates a cosmic ray gun | Astronomy.com
The cloudy feature, referred to as MG J0414+0534, sits in a galaxy that hosts a supermassive black hole in its core. Such giant black holes are known to blast jets of fast-moving ionized matter far out into space. And in this new study, published March 27 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters , researchers seem to see exactly that.
Based on ALMA observations bolstered by a giant cosmic lens, the team found that MG J0414+0534 highlights how powerful jets from black holes can tear through surrounding clouds of gas and dust.
How did supermassive black holes get so big and chonky? Scientists still don't know. | Space
Active galaxies are by far the brightest objects in the universe, and they are powered by monster black holes that lie at their centers. But finding the origins of those giant black holes has proven challenging for astronomers. New observations underscore that difficulty.
Although simulations suggest that black holes should grow quickly in the early universe , when astronomers look back in time they simply cannot find many such structures. That struggle continues even now, with new research that describes a hunt for such objects.
Supermassive black holes: How did they grow so fast?
Whilst astronomers are fairly certain that supermassive black holes, billions of times more massive than our Sun, dwell at the center of almost every galaxy in the Universe, they are still unsure how these cosmic monsters reach such tremendous sizes.
The problem seems to be one of time, the Universe is 14 billion years old, and recent observations seem to confirm that such black holes were already present when it was just 800 million years old — thus in its relative infancy. How could these black holes have accrued so much matter to supermassive status in such a, relatively, short space of time?
Happening on Twitter
Astronomers looked incredibly closely at a supermassive black hole halfway across the Universe and saw something re… https://t.co/Be18u1etr0 BadAstronomer (from Boulder) Wed Apr 08 15:19:35 +0000 2020
This weird black hole is bending light back on itself like a boomerang https://t.co/CeVCvSR2e1 https://t.co/kR6OVOH2l8 SPACEdotcom (from NYC) Wed Apr 08 19:02:03 +0000 2020
Event Horizon Telescope spots weird black-hole jet mystery inside quasar https://t.co/34o17mxGJL https://t.co/KffSIebWkM SPACEdotcom (from NYC) Tue Apr 07 19:06:34 +0000 2020
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