Astronomers have observed the effect of a distant feeding black hole that is ejecting tremendous amounts of energy and blowing giant cosmic bubbles into the material around it.
Observations of the galaxy cluster MS0735, located 2.6 billion light-years away, may reveal new information about the mysterious cavities or “radio bubbles” around black holes and why they don’t deflate under the pressure of their surroundings. Let’s go
“We are witnessing one of the most energetic explosions ever observed from a supermassive black hole,” McGill University physicist Jack Orlovsky-Scherrer, lead author of the research, said in a statement. Statement (opens in new tab), “This is what happens when you feed a black hole and it violently ejects an enormous amount of energy.”
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Supermassive black holes are found at the center of most massive galaxies, including the Milky Way, at the center of which lies the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*).
These home galaxies and their supermassive black hole residents are often found together in groups of hundreds or thousands, called galactic clusters.
These clusters are also home to atmospheres that fill the space between galaxies with incredibly hot gas, or plasma, at temperatures of around 90 million °F (50 million °C). While this plasma may cool over time and allow cool dense gas to form and eventually collapse to give birth to new stars, feeding the black hole may work against this process.
Supermassive black holes can reheat this gas through violent outbursts of material. This outflow occurs when some of this matter is not swallowed by the black hole, but is instead pulled to its poles from where it is blasted off at near the speed of light. This process, known as “feedback,” quenches the formation of new stars with jets of material and also carves cavities in the surrounding gas.
As this gas is pushed away from the center of galactic clusters, it is replaced by bubbles that emit radio waves.
Moving these huge volumes of gas requires enormous amounts of energy and astronomers are trying to understand where this energy comes from, as well as to find out what is left of these empty cavities. .
To learn more about such gas bubbles in galactic clusters and the processes that create them, the team of astronomers, including Orlovsky-Scherer, trained the Green Bank Telescope’s MUSTANG-2 receiver on the cluster MS0735. The Green Bank Telescope observations were complemented by X-ray data previously collected from MS0735 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
They also employed a subtle distortion effect that fast-moving electrons in hot cluster gas form a region of radiation on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) left over from an event shortly after the Big Bang that uniformly filled the universe. Is.
This effect on this fossil radiation that was emitted 380,000 years after the beginning of the universe when the universe had expanded and cooled enough to allow electrons to bind with the protons that made up the first atoms and thus the photons known as the “first light”. To be allowed to travel independently. Sunyaev–Zeldovich (SZ) effect.
MUSTANG-2 conducts its observations at the 90 GHz frequency, at which the SZ impact signal mainly represents thermal pressure.
Research associate and European Southern Observatory (ESO) astronomer Tony said, “With the power of Mustang-2, we’re able to look into these cavities and begin to determine what they’re filled with, and the pressure they exert.” Why don’t I fall in?” Murczkowski explained.
The team determined that at least part of the support that keeps the cavities from collapsing comes from things other than heat, high-speed charged particles traveling at near-light speeds in these non-thermal sources. Which are called cosmic rays and turbulence. They also found that a small contribution comes from the magnetic field.
This implies that the pressure support within the radio bubble around the supermassive black hole is more subtle than previously thought, combining thermal and non-thermal sources.
The team of astronomers now aims to observe the same system at different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation to see how exotic the black hole outflow is and gain deeper insight into the physics of galactic clusters.
“These new findings are the deepest high-fidelity SZ imaging yet of the thermodynamic state of cavities in galaxy clusters,” said Tracy Clark, research co-author and US Naval Research Laboratory astronomer. “We knew this was an exciting system when we studied radio cores and lobes at low frequencies, but we are only now starting to see the full picture.”
The team’s research is published in the latest edition of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (opens in new tab),
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