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Astronomers have witnessed a dormant supermassive black hole in a remote galaxy releasing jets of extremely hot gas, signifying the initial occasion a black hole has “activated” within human existence.
Observations also suggest the presence of an invisible star that may be precariously positioned near this black hole, yet astonishingly averting being consumed by the void. Investigating this star that defies doom could yield long-desired revelations regarding the elusive dynamics between the cosmic giants and the matter in the surrounding gas disks that influence their feeding patterns, researchers indicate.
This specific supermassive black hole, which has a mass equivalent to 1.4 million suns and resides at the core of the galaxy 1ES 1927+654 approximately 270 million light-years from our planet, has kept astronomers intrigued over the past few years due to its unusual activity. Following an extended phase of dormancy since a mysterious flare-up in 2018, it began to consistently emit X-rays starting in late 2022, alerting astronomers to yet another significant but unexplained event in progress.
Indeed, shortly thereafter, radio emissions from the galaxy, which had been virtually absent, “abruptly surged very rapidly — so rapidly it was nearly suspicious,” Eileen Meyer, an associate professor of physics at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who oversaw the radio observations, stated on Monday (Jan. 13) during an American Astronomical Society (AAS) press briefing.
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“This is unprecedented — we’ve never observed a black hole transition from being radio silent to suddenly very radio active,” she added. “The timing was exceptionally fortunate.”
Images from a collection of radio telescopes across the U.S. indicated previously unseen jets had “activated,” ejecting hot blobs of plasma from both sides of the black hole at around one-third the speed of light. While the exact trigger for the newly formed jets remains unclear, Meyer and her associates suspect that the 2018 flare-up — which might have resulted from the black hole consuming a nearby star — likely played a significant part by supplying essential materials for jet formation.
If this holds true, the researchers estimate that the jets will blaze for approximately 1,000 years on the material from the consumed star before ceasing. These findings are detailed in a paper released on Monday (Jan. 13) in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Untold narratives
Astronomers have been bewildered by the behavior of this black hole since 2018, when it started emitting such intense X-rays that regions of ultrahot gas above and below its accretion disk, referred to as black hole coronas, brightened up to 100 times in a span of merely eight hours — a clear indication that the cosmic entity was actively consuming matter from the accretion disk. For reasons that remain unknown, the spiking radiation dramatically disappeared soon after, but rebounded almost immediately, ultimately shining 20 times brighter than before.
Such extreme fluctuations in radiation were extraordinary, prompting astronomers to initially question the reliability of the data. However, “when we confirmed it was genuine, it was incredibly thrilling,” astrophysicist Claudio Ricci, an assistant professor at Diego Portales University in Chile, remarked in a statement at the time. “However, we also had no understanding of what we were confronting; no one we consulted had witnessed anything like this.”
An essential piece of the puzzle emerged in 2022, when the intensity of X-ray emissions, which had until then varied unpredictably, began to rise and fall in a cycle of 18 minutes. Data from the NICER and XMM-Newton space observatories indicated that the frequency continued to increase until it stabilized at every seven minutes, where it has remained since last year.
Determining the cause of this sustained stability is vital, researchers assert, as it may clarify whether the jets themselves are oscillating — in which case, there is no evident explanation for why its fluctuations would evolve over time into such a high frequency.
The more plausible explanation, one that scientists comprehend better in terms of the involved physics, is that an orbiting companion, lingering very nearby to the black hole, is remarkably resisting being consumed.
An unseen companion
The location and frequency of the X-ray signals imply that any orbiting companion must be situated within just a few million miles of the behemoth’s event horizon, which is the limit beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. A small black hole would plunge directly into the supermassive black hole, and any ordinary star would swiftly be torn apart by the immense gravitational force of the behemoth.
In contrast, only a white dwarf, the dense remnant of a sun-like star, meets the criteria, according to Megan Masterson, a PhD candidate at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research and co-author of an upcoming paper investigating this situation. The white dwarf would be challenging to disintegrate due to its extreme compactness and might have already existed in the accretion disk before drifting closer to the black hole, potentially clarifying the rising frequency of X-ray signals noticed by researchers.
Now positioned at the inner edge of the black hole’s accretion disk, this stellar remnant might sporadically shed some of its material, which would effectively “provide a little bit of extra energy to help keep you outside of the black hole’s event horizon,” Masterson explained during the AAS press conference.
If a white dwarf is indeed behind the black hole’s mysterious behavior, the system should be producing gravitational waves: faint ripples in the structure of spacetime that travel through space at the speed of light. The frequencies of these waves fall within the “optimal range” for detection by the upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, or LISA, a massive space-based gravitational wave detector anticipated to be launched in 2035.
Rough estimates regarding the mass the white dwarf is shedding imply “it should be capable of persisting for quite some time,” Masterson stated. “But who can tell? One of the things I’ve learned from this source is that we can never truly predict what will occur next.”
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