Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Space Telescope witnessed a massive black hole jet slamming into an unknown object in space. Astronomers have seen black holes eject cosmic objects before, but this appears to be different from those events.
The discovery comes in the form of a strange signature in the bright jets ejected from supermassive jets. black hole at the center of the galaxy Centaur A (Cen A), about 12 million light-years from Earth. The new study also shows that at several points along its galaxy-scale length, jets of high-energy particles from the black hole are traveling at nearly the speed of light.
Although Cen A’s jets supermassive black hole Chandra’s data has been well-studied in the past, but it reveals something new and unexpected about this outflow.
The team discovered the emission linked to a bright V-shaped X-ray source in Cen A.
According to NASAthe “arm” of this V-shaped launch is about 700 light years long. For context, that’s about 175 times the distance between the Sun and the closest star to our solar system, Beside the Centaur.
What we know and what we don’t know about this black hole jet
Jets from supermassive black holes do not come from the black hole itself, but from around it. These cosmic titans show that because their boundaries are called “event horizon“In this case, even light isn’t moving fast enough to escape. Nothing with mass can move as fast as light, which means nothing can escape the black hole.
Some black holes are surrounded by flat clouds of gas and dust, calledaccretion disk“Feed them gradually. However, not all of this material is destined to fall into the maw of the central black hole, because Black holes are “random eaters”.
This is because the powerful magnetic fields surrounding a black hole can guide matter toward its poles. From there, the particles are accelerated to high speeds and energies and ejected in astrophysical jets that can extend over long periods of time. Millions of light years.
While astronomers have a good understanding of the physics of jets fired from the supermassive black hole at the center of Cen A, they don’t know what object they’re blowing up. This is because it is so far away that even the most powerful telescopes currently available cannot distinguish it in detail.
This isn’t the first time scientists have seen black hole jets explode objects in space. These other target objects include gas clouds and even unlucky stars.
This collision was different from those events because, while they produced elliptical “spots” in X-ray images, this one produced V-shaped structures.
The team will now try to determine why this particular collision produced the strange shape. This investigation will be conducted with chandrathe only X-ray telescope currently sensitive enough to see this collision signature.
The team’s research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.