image source, European Space Agency
Astronomers have observed an unprecedented explosion of a supermassive black hole the size of 30 million suns.
Experts identified the bright burst of X-rays that appeared and quickly disappeared.
As it faded, the gravitational monster ejected material into space at a breathtaking speed of 60,000 kilometers per second.
The research, published in the journal Astronomy and astrophysicssuggests that the winds triggered by the lightning are similar to those that form on the Sun, which could provide broader clues about our universe.
What is a Black Hole?
Despite their name, black holes are not holes, but enormous amounts of matter concentrated in a very small space, according to the US space agency NASA. They are so dense that nothing can escape them, not even light.
They remain one of the most mysterious cosmic objects in the universe.
Supermassive black holes have a mass thousands, sometimes billions, of times greater than that of our sun. They are located at the center of almost all large galaxies.
They are surrounded by disks of gas and dust rotating around them and can be absorbed by the black hole due to their strong gravity.
As the black hole “eats” this material, the disks heat up enormously and emit bright light of different wavelengths, including X-rays.
It also emits jets and streams of gas, called winds, containing ionized atoms that can even influence the birth of new stars in the galaxy.
“We have never observed a black hole generating winds so quickly,” says Liyi Gu, senior researcher at the Netherlands Space Research Organization (SRON).
The supermassive black hole studied is located in a spiral galaxy about 130 million light-years from Earth.
To observe it, researchers used two telescopes that worked together to reveal this unique event.
One of these is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) XMM-Newton telescope, which studies X-ray sources across the universe.
The other is the telescope X-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission (XRISM), which is part of a mission led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) with support from ESA and NASA.
image source, ESA/Hubble/NASA/MC Bentz/DJV Rosario
The bright region fed by the supermassive black hole is called the active galactic nucleus (AGN).
“The winds around this black hole appear to have arisen when the AGN’s complicated magnetic field suddenly ‘dissolved’, similar to flares that occur on the Sun, but on an almost unimaginable scale,” explains Matteo Guainazzi, ESA’s XRISM project scientist and co-author of the discovery.
Camille Diez, a member of the team and ESA researcher, says that AGNs with strong winds play “an important role” in the evolution of their galaxies over time.
“Because they are so influential, knowing more about the magnetism of active galactic nuclei and the way they generate such winds is key to understanding the history of galaxies throughout the universe,” he says.
Secrets of the Universe
The research found that the winds observed from the black hole are similar to the large eruptions that occur on the Sun, known as coronal mass ejections. These are massive ejections of charged particles from the outermost layer of the sun that can have an impact on Earth.
image source, Solar Orbiter/EUI Team/ESA/Nasa
They usually occur at the same time as a solar flare, which is a burst of radiation created when energy stored in “twisted” magnetic fields is released.
“By focusing on an active supermassive black hole, the two telescopes discovered something we have never seen before: fast, ultrafast winds caused by flares similar to those that form in the Sun,” says Erik Kuulkers, ESA’s XMM-Newton project scientist.
“It’s exciting because it suggests that solar physics and high-energy physics could work in strikingly similar ways across the universe,” he adds.
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