The massive black hole in the center of a galaxy in the constellation of the Virgin “woke up”, producing X -ray jets at almost regular intervals, which intrigue the astronomers, according to a study published on Friday.
Galaxy SDSS1335+0728 Photo: X
Located at 300 million years from Earth, the distant galaxy SDSS1335+0728 has recently been the object of reduced attention from astronomers.
But, at the end of 2019, she suddenly began to shine with a special brightness. And in February 2024, a team led by Lorena Hernandez-Garcia, from Valparaiso University in Chile, began to observe X-ray jets at almost regular intervals, writes Agerpres.
Those X -ray jets reported that the black hole in the center of that galaxy are in the process of “awakening.”
Most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a massive black hole in their center. This cosmic object is invisible by definition, because it is so compact that its gravitational force prevents even light from escaping.
When a star has the misfortune to approach too much, it is torn: the matter that composes it is dislocated, then rotates very quickly around the black hole, forming an accretion disk, before part of it is swallowed forever. This phenomenon is known as “breaking through tide effect”.
But a black hole can also go through long phases of inactivity, during which it does not actively attract cosmic matter and no radiation is detected around it.
The bright and compact region in the center of the SDSS1335+0728 galaxy is now classified as an active galactic nucleus, nicknamed “Ansky.
“This rare event gives us the opportunity to observe the behavior of the black hole in real time, using spatial telescopes with X-ray, such as XMM-Newton (of the European Space Agency) and Nicer, Chandra and Swift, of NASA”explained Lorena Hernandez-Garcia in a statement that accompanies the study published in Nature Astronomy magazine.
Unusual features
These short -term X -ray jets are known as “quasi-periodic eruptions ” (QPE) and “We still do not understand what causes them ”stressed the Chilean specialist in astronomy.
The current hypothesis is that QPEs are associated with accretion discs formed as a result of “breaks by tide effect”. But no sign of destruction of a star has been detected in the gravitational field of the Black Horway. And “Ansky” eruptions have unusual features.
They are “ten times longer and ten times brighter” Than the typical QPE, explained Joheen Chakrabory, a team member who conducted the study and PhD student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.
“Each of these eruptions releases a hundred times more energy than we have noticed in other places in space. They also have the longest cadence ever observed, about 4.5 days. This pushes the theoretical models to their limits and questions the existing ideas regarding the generation of these X -ray jets“he added in the press release that accompanies the study.
This caused the research authors to consider other hypotheses. According to them, the accretion disk could have been made up of gases captured by the black hole in its vicinity.
In this scenario, the X -ray jets would come from the extremely energy shocks in the disc, caused by a small heavenly object that repeatedly passes through it.
“Imagine a star that rotates around the black hole on an inclined orbit to the disc. The star crosses the disc twice on the orbit, without a very strong force that pulls it inside,” explained Norbert Schartel, the director of the Scientific Department of the XMM-Newton telescope.
“We are still at the point where we have more theoretical models than concrete data about QPEs. We need more observations to understand what is happening.”added one of his colleagues from ESA, Erwan Quintin.
