Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
Astronomers in England have discovered a supermassive black hole many times larger than should be possible. In astrophysics, very few rules are hard and fast. There are mostly just loose parameters, theories and informed expectations -- expectations that are constantly being subverted by newly discovered phenomena.
That's what happened in England, where researchers at Keele University and the University of Central Lancashire had to throw their expectations out the window after measuring the impossibly large size of a black hole at the center of a newly discovered galaxy. Using satellite data to ascertain the speed of the gas swirling around the black hole, and the nature of the light being emitted by the accreted gas, scientists were able to ascertain the gravitational pull -- and thus the size -- of the black hole at the center of the SAGE0536AGN galaxy.
A rendering shows the swirling disc of gas that surround black holes. Photo by NASA
The black hole is 350 million times more massive than our sun. Meanwhile, the galaxy measures 25 billion solar masses, seventy times the size of the black hole. It's a ratio never before observed -- a black hole 30 times larger than scientists expected, given the size of its galactic home. "Galaxies have a vast mass, and so do the black holes in their cores," Jacco van Loon, an astrophysicist at Keele University, said in a press release. "This one though is really too big for its boots -- it simply shouldn't be possible for it to be so large." Van Loon is the lead author of a new paper on the befuddling black hole, published this week in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The black hole's growth has somehow managed to outpace the expansion of its home galaxy, but researchers aren't sure whether the black hole's growth was bolstered by an external force or if something retarded the growth of the galaxy. Though the black hole is currently an oddball in the universe, Van Loon and his colleagues say the phenomena may simply represent a new class galaxies. To find out for sure, astronomers will just have to keep looking.
Supermassive black hole bigger than scientists thought was possible
It’s an annual event the space agency has set aside for the past three years to post photos and provide the public with information about black holes on their websites, Facebook and Twitter feeds. They even have a special hashtag for the event – #BlackHoleFriday. Just in time for Black Hole Friday, in a new study published in the journal Science, an international team of physicists say they have made the first observations of a supermassive black hole devouring a star, while at the same time spitting a bit of it back out in the form of a high-speed flare that’s moving matter at nearly the speed of light.
Artist impression of a black hole consuming a star that has been torn apart by the black hole’s strong gravity. As a result of this massive “meal” the black hole begins to launch a powerful jet that can be detected with radio telescopes.
According to Dr. James Miller-Jones, an astrophysicist at Australia’s International Center for Radio Astronomy Research and a member of the research team, the energy produced by the plasma jets in this event is about the entire energy output of the Sun over 10 million years. “It’s the first time we see everything from the stellar destruction followed by the launch of a conical outflow, also called a jet, and we watched it unfold over several months,” said team-leader Sjoert van Velzen, a Hubble fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland in a press release.
Artist’s conception of a star being drawn toward a black hole and destroyed (left), and the black hole later emitting a “jet” of plasma composed of debris left from the star’s destruction.
The study tracked the doomed star over several months as it traveled along its normal path and then be pulled in by the tremendous gravity of the black hole. The team’s study backs up a theory made earlier by astrophysicists who predicted that when huge amounts of gas, or in this particular instance an entire star, are crammed into a black hole, a fast-moving jet of plasma (flare) can burst from near the black hole’s event horizon or rim. This rare event is taking place in a galaxy named PGC 043234 that is only 300 million light years away. That’s considered to be a relatively close distance to Earth which the scientists said helped them make their observations.
MORE
Well, this is interesting it makes me think about the development of Black hole energy and how we can eventually design a space craft that runs on Darkmatter. There's all ready experiments going on with Antihydrogen. If you do a little searching though the internet you'll see what I'm talking about. As for Black holes. One of the things about Black holes is that there not usually a funnal, but there usually a sphere.
We are WAY far away from antimatter as an energy source.
The celestial feeding frenzy — known as a tidal disruption event — was detected from the high-energy, X-ray echoes emitted as debris from the hapless star swirled in a vortex near the black hole’s center. The findings were published in the prestigious science journal Nature. “Never before have we been able to see strong gravity effects from a dormant black hole,” said Erin Kara, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at the University of Maryland and lead author of the study. Black holes are regions in space-time where mass is collapsed into such a small area that gravity takes over completely, and nothing — not even light — can escape.
They cannot be seen and are inferred from their influence on nearby objects. Most of what astronomers know about so-called supermassive black holes — found at the center of galaxies — comes from a relative handful that actively gather and consume matter. About 90 percent are dormant, only awakening from time to time to gulp down anything that passes too close. When that happens to a star, it disappears in a swirling flash of energy and light. “Most tidal disruptions don’t emit much in the high-energy X-ray band,” Kara said.
Only three such episodes have ever been recorded, “and this is the first such event that has been caught at its peak,” Kara said. The tell-tale signs from this particular slumbering giant, dubbed Swift J1644+57, were picked up by NASA’s Swift satellite, the researchers reported. Three more satellites — one from the European Space Agency, another from Japan and a third from NASA — tuned in to the event, yielding a treasure-trove of “excellent data.”
Supermassive black hole ‘awakens’ to tear star to shreds - Taipei Times
If astronomers are right, the next generation of gravitational wave detectors are going to be very busy. According to a new survey of all the matter in the universe, the cosmos is teeming with black holes. And lots of black holes mean lots of black hole mergers -- the cosmic collisions that generate gravitational waves. The new model of the universe's matter was created by a team of scientists from Europe and the United States. Researchers say it's the most complete model yet compiled. Its credibility is bolstered by the fact that it predicted the collision that produced the space-time shock waves recently measured by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.
The types of binary black holes that produced the waves detected by LIGO aren't like most black holes. They're especially massive, formed from ancient stars that burn a purer form of hydrogen. The stars that birthed these black holes upon their deaths were, at their peak, 40 to 60 times more massive than our sun. While such massive pairs of black holes aren't common in the modern universe, there are plenty in some distant regions of the universe. "These rare regions act like factories for building identifiable pairs of black holes," Richard O'Shaughnessy, an assistant professor of mathematical sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in a news release.
The new model -- detailed in the journal Nature -- has yielded a number of insights into the likely nature of these supermassive black holes. Simulations suggest their spin rates are constant and their orbits remain on a single plane. The kickback produced by their wave-inducing collisions isn't enough to augment their positioning, but it is large enough to influence the axes of smaller black holes.
Researchers say their model is already being used by several other gravitational wave research projects, and will help astronomers better anticipate and analyze the next black hole collision -- of which the model suggests there will be several. "LIGO is not going to see 1,000 black holes like these each year, but many of them will be even better and more exciting because we will have a better instrument -- better glasses to view them with and better techniques," O'Shaughnessy said.
Study: Universe is teeming with black holes
The matter-munching sinkhole is a whopping 13 billion light-years away, so far that we see it as it was a mere 690 million years after the Big Bang. But at about 800 million times the mass of our Sun, it managed to grow to a surprisingly large size such a short time after the origin of the Universe. The find is described in the journal Nature. This relic from the early Universe is busily devouring material at the centre of a galaxy - marking it out as a so-called quasar.
Quasars are some of the brightest objects in the Universe
Matter, such as gas, falling onto the black hole will form an ultra-hot mass of material around it known as an accretion disk. "Quasars are among the brightest and most distant known celestial objects and are crucial to understanding the early Universe," said co-author Bram Venemans of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany. This quasar is interesting because it comes from a time when the Universe was just 5% of its current age. At this time, the cosmos was beginning to emerge from a period known as the dark ages - just before the first stars appeared. "Gathering all this mass in under 690 million years is an enormous challenge for theories of supermassive black hole growth," said co-author Eduardo Bañados, from the Carnegie Institution for Science.
The quasar's distance is described by a property called its redshift - a measurement of how much the wavelength of its light is stretched by the expansion of the Universe before reaching Earth. The newly discovered black hole has a redshift of 7.54. The higher the redshift, the greater the distance, and the farther back astronomers are looking in time when they observe the object. Prior to this discovery, the record-holder for the furthest known quasar existed when the Universe was about 800 million years old. "Despite extensive searches, it took more than half a decade to catch a glimpse of something this far back in the history of the Universe," said Dr Bañados.
The Gemini North observatory was among several involved in the discovery
The discovery of a massive black hole so early on may provide key clues on conditions that abounded when the Universe was young. "This finding shows that a process obviously existed in the early Universe to make this monster," Dr Bañados explained. "What that process is? Well, that will keep theorists very busy." The unexpected discovery is based on data amassed from observatories around the world. This includes data from the Gemini North observatory on Hawaii's Maunakea volcano and a Nasa space telescope called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise).
Farthest monster black hole found
