Scientists Have Spotted A Faraway Black Hole Burping & Suffering From Interstellar Indigestion
The discovery could prove something we've long suspected about black holes.
Astronomers have spotted a massive black hole near the centre of a galaxy, but it seems to have a bit of stellar indigestion.
Inside galaxy SDSS J1354+1327 (J1354 for short) about 800 million light years away from Earth, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope have spotted a supermassive black hole maybe a billion times bigger than our Sun. And the scientists that found it have seen it ¡°burping out hot gases¡±. Twice.
Thing is, when cosmic gas comes near a black hole like this, it¡¯s superheated by the massive magnetic and gravitational forces at play here. Most of it gets sucked inward, but some of it is expelled in a powerful outflow
The thing is, astronomers know all about how black holes and their rudeness. But this particular black hole has already burped at least once, over 100,000 years earlier.
reuters
¡°Black holes are voracious eaters, but it turns out they don't have very good table manners,¡± University of Colorado¡¯s Julie Comerford, said at an astronomy convention in Washington DC. ¡°There are a lot of examples of black holes with single burps emanating out, but we discovered a galaxy with a supermassive black hole that has not one but two burps.¡±
The new discovery is important because it supports a previous theory, that black holes go through cycles of eating, burping, and then going dark as they take a ¡°nap¡±. In this galaxy¡¯s case, the black holes cycle looks to be about 100,000 years long. That¡¯s a massive amount of time from our perspective but nothing on the universe¡¯s time scale.
