Like a scene from a science fiction film, astronomers using NASA telescopes have found “space jaws”.
Hiding at 600 million light years, in the black depths of ink between the stars, there is an invisible monster swallowing a capricious star which falls towards it. The sneaky black hole betrayed its presence in a newly identified (TDE) disturbance event where an unhappy star was torn and swallowed in an explosion of spectacular radiation. These disturbance events are powerful probes on the physics of the black hole, revealing the conditions necessary to launch jets and winds when a black hole is consuming a star, and are considered to be brilliant objects by telescopes.
The new TDE, called AT2024TVD, allowed astronomers to locate a black wandering supermassive hole using NASA Hubble space telescopewith similar support observations from NASA Chandra X -ray observatory And the nrao Very large painting Telescope which also showed that the black hole is offset from the center of the galaxy.
The document will be published in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
This illustration with six panels of a disturbance event of the tides around a supermassive black hole shows the following: 1) a supermassive black hole is drifting inside a galaxy, its presence only detectable by gravitational them; 2) A capricious star is swept away in the intense gravitational traction of the black hole; 3) The star is stretched or “spaghetified” by effects of gravitational tide; 4) The remains of the star form a disc around the black hole; 5) There is a period of accretion of black holes, pouring a radiation through the electromagnetic spectrum, from X -rays to radio wavelengths; And 6) The host galaxy, seen from afar, contains a lightning of brilliant energy which is shifted from the nucleus of the galaxy, where an even more solid black hole lives.
Work of art: NASA, ESA, STSCI, Ralf Crawford (STSCI)
Surprisingly, this black mass hole with a million solar does not reside exactly in the center of the host galaxy, where there are generally supermassive black holes, and actively swallows the surrounding material. Out of approximately 100 TDE events recorded by surveys on the optical sky so far, it is the first time that an offbeat TDE has been identified. The others are associated with the central black holes of the galaxies.
In fact, in the center of the host galaxy, there is a different black hole weighing 100 million times the mass of the sun. Hubble’s optical precision shows that the TDE was only 2,600 light years from the more massive black hole in the center of the galaxy. It is only a tenth of the distance between our sun and the central supermassif black hole of the Milky Way.
This larger black hole spit in energy because it accuses infallible gas, and it is classified as an active galactic nucleus. Strangely, the two supermassive black holes coexist in the same galaxy, but are not linked to gravitation as a binary pair. The smallest black hole can possibly unleash in the center of the galaxy to merge with the largest black hole. But for the moment, it is too separate to be linked to gravitation.
A TDE occurs when an infallible star is stretched or “spaghetified” by the immense forces of gravitational tide of a black hole. The grated stellar remains are fired on a circular orbit around the black hole. This generates shocks and outings with high temperatures that can be observed in Ultraviolet and visible Light.
“AT2024TVD is the first compensated TDE captured by Sky optical surveys, and it opens up all the possibility of discovering this elusive population of wandering black holes with future Sky surveys,” said the Main Study Yuhan Yao of the University of California in Berkeley. “Right now, theorists have not paid a lot of attention to the compensation TDE.” I think this discovery will motivate scientists to seek more examples of this type of event. “”
This is an image of Hubble space telescope of the distant galaxy which is hosting at the indicative of a traveling black hole.
Science: NASA, ESA, STSCI, Yuhan Yao (UC Berkeley); Image processing: Joseph Depasquale (STSCI)
The collapsed black hole of the stars has moved away when several survey telescopes in the ground on the ground observed a thrust as brilliant as a supernova. But unlike a supernova, astronomers know that it came from a black hole nibble on a star because the rocket was very hot and showed large lines of emission of hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen and silicon. Zwicky’s transient installation of the Palomar Observatory in Caltech, with its 1.2 meter telescope which examines the whole northern sky every two days, first observed the event.
“The disturbance events of the tides are very promising to shed light on the presence of massive black holes that we would otherwise be to detect,” said Ryan Chornock, assistant professor associated with UC Berkeley and member of the ZTF team. “Theorists predicted that a population of massive black holes located far from the centers of galaxies must exist, but now we can use TDEs to find them.”
The flare was apparently compensated by the center of a brilliant massive galaxy such as Pan-Starrs (telescope of the panoramic study and rapid response system), the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Desi Leging Investigation. To better determine that it was not at the Galactic Center, the Yao team used the Chandra X -ray observatory of NASA to confirm that the X -rays of the Flare site were also offset.
Hubble resolution power had to settle all the uncertainties. Hubble’s sensitivity in ultraviolet light also allows it to locate the location of the TDE, which is much more blue than the rest of the galaxy.
This is an image of an observatory of X -shaped X -ray rays Hubble Télescope / Chandra of a distant galaxy which is host of the revealing signature of a traveling black hole. The two telescopes caught an event of disturbance of the tides (TDE) caused by the black hole eating a star.
Science: NASA, ESA, STSCI, Yuhan Yao (UC Berkeley); Image processing: Joseph Depasquale (STSCI)
The black hole responsible for the TDE lurks inside the bulge of the massive galaxy. The black hole only becomes evident every tens of thousands of years when it “resumes” to capture a star, then it returns again until its next meal arrives.
How was the black hole decentrated? Anterior theoretical studies have shown that black holes can be ejected outside the centers of galaxies due to three -body interactions, where the lowest limb is expelled. This can be the case here, given the proximity of the stealthy black hole with the central black hole. “If the black hole has undergone a triple interaction with two other black holes in the heart of the galaxy, it can always remain linked to the galaxy, in orbit around the central region,” said Yao.
Another explanation is that the black hole is the rest surviving of a smaller galaxy which merged with the host galaxy more than a billion years ago. If this is the case, the black hole could possibly transform to merge with the central active black hole in the future very far. So, at present, astronomers do not know if it is going or going.
Erica Hammerstein, another postdoctoral researcher from the Berkeley, examined the Hubble images as part of the study, but found no evidence of a merger of past galaxies. But she explained: “There are already good evidence that the galaxies mergers improve TDE rates, but the presence of a second black hole in the host galaxy of 2024TVD means that at one point in the past of this galaxy, a merger must have taken place.”
Specialized for different types of light, observatories like Hubble and Chandra work together to identify and better understand ephemeral events like these. Future telescopes which will also be optimized to capture transitional events like this include the National Science Foundation VERA C. Rubin Observatory And the next NASA Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. They will offer more opportunities to the observations of monitoring hubble to focus on the exact location of a transitional.
The Hubble space telescope has been working for more than three decades and continues to make revolutionary discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is an international cooperation project between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). The Goddard Space Flight Center from NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, also supports mission operations in Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute of Baltimore, which is exploited by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, leads Hubble Science Operations for NASA.
The ZTF is a public-private partnership, with equal support for the ZTF partnership and the US National Science Foundation.