Written by |
Khaled Yunes |
Saturday 12 November 2022 – 6.08pm
Astronomers have been tracking a medium-mass black hole hidden in a dwarf galaxy gobbling up an “unfortunate” stray star very close to it. The star’s tear, known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, released a radiation wave that briefly dimmed the host dwarf galaxy’s combined starlight, which could help scientists better understand the relationship between the black holes and galaxies.
Astronomers say the discovery has already generated “widespread enthusiasm” and could help not only find such black holes, but also tell them more about their size.
Before the discovery, the intermediate-mass black hole was lurking in a quiet dwarf galaxy 850 million light-years from Earth. But it was discovered when the star fell out of its orbit near the black hole, causing a “violent wave perturbation event” that produced a bright flare that shone across the universe.
The glow was captured by astronomers working on the Young Supernovae Experiment (YSE), a survey designed to detect cosmic explosions and transient (short-lived) astrophysical events.
The international team of astronomers, led by scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Niels Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen and Washington State University, announced the discovery in a paper published Nov. 10 in the journal Nature Astronomy.
“This discovery has generated great excitement because we can use violent wave perturbation events to not only find more intermediate-mass black holes in galaxies,” said co-author Ryan Foley, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz. but also to measure their masses.”
The scientists stressed that the results not only show the existence of this newly discovered black hole, but will also allow them to learn more about other intermediate black holes.
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Charlotte Angus of the Niels Bohr Institute, lead author of the paper, said: ‘The fact that we were able to capture this medium-sized black hole devouring a star has given us a wonderful opportunity to discover what may have been hidden in it. Furthermore, we can use the properties of the glow itself to understand its behavior.” This elusive group of intermediate-weight black holes, which may account for most of the black holes at the center of galaxies.”
All massive galaxies, including our Milky Way, have supermassive black holes at their centers, but scientists believe these supermassive black holes — which can reach billions of times the mass of our Sun — may have been smaller, medium-sized black holes. mass. Equivalent to thousands to hundreds of thousands of solar masses, according to Russia Today.
Scientists believe that the way such huge black holes gather may be explained by a theory that says the early universe was rich in small dwarf galaxies with medium-mass black holes, and over time, these dwarf galaxies merged or they were eaten up by huge galaxies, and in doing so, black holes could have grown inside them. What makes this merger process ultimately leads to the creation of the supermassive black holes we see today.
Scientists hope that finding more of these elusive intermediate-mass black holes will allow us to build a picture of how many black holes there are and where they are. This, in turn, could help tell us how supermassive black holes form and whether they are at the center of all dwarf galaxies.
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