CNN Indonesia
Monday, 11 Dec 2023 08:51 IWST
Illustration. Experts discover strange ‘blobs’ near black holes. (Screenshot of nasa.gov website)
Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Gas ‘lump’ nearby black hole supermassive at the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy detected as the perpetrator of the shooting gamma rays high energy regularly towards the Earth.
In study non-peer-review on the preprint server arXiva duo of astrophysicists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico revealed bursts of radiation coming from clumps of gas rotating around black holes at almost a third the speed of light.
The team’s findings may solve a mystery regarding the Milky Way’s central black hole (officially named Sagittarius A* or Sgr A* and located about 26,700 light years from Earth) that has baffled astronomers for two years.
Waves of gamma-ray radiation from around Sgr A* were first detected circling Earth in 2021. However, the team that made the observations knew that the radiation could not have come from inside the supermassive black hole itself.
This is because all black holes are bounded by a region called the event horizon, which marks the point where nothing, not even light, has the speed necessary to escape the black hole’s immense gravity.
This means that the black hole itself does not emit radiation, so the gamma rays must come from the environment around Sgr A*.
Other supermassive black holes are known to emit strong radiation from their surroundings when their gravitational influence produces turbulent conditions in the surrounding gas and dust, forming a structure called an accretion disk.
As the black hole consumes this material, the accretion disk emits light that spans the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves to high-energy gamma rays.
However, this cannot explain the gamma ray phenomenon from Sgr A*. The reason is, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way is surrounded by very little matter and ‘eats;’ very slowly.
University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey, who was not involved in the research, likened the black hole’s devouring speed to humans living on just one grain of grain or rice every million years.
Use a telescope
Using data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope collected between June and December 2022, the researchers of this study aimed to uncover the origin of these gamma rays.
The duo searched publicly available Fermi data to determine the periodicity patterns of gamma-ray emissions. They found that pulses appeared from near Sgr A* approximately once every 76.32 minutes.
This emission period is half the time between waves of X-ray radiation that are also seen to originate from around the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole, suggesting the two emissions are aligned and most likely related.
“The coincidence of multi-wavelength periodicity in X-rays and gamma rays points to a single physical mechanism that produces them,” the team wrote in the paper.
The revelation of what the researchers call a “unique physical mechanism of oscillations” led them to conclude that gamma rays and X-rays were emitted by a “clump” of gas rotating around Sgr A*.
The speed, reported LiveSciencereaching about 30 percent the speed of light or about 200 million mph (320 million km/h).
They think this speeding lump of matter emits light via several wavelengths of radiation as it rotates around Sgr A* and lights up periodically as its orbit moves.
The discovery could give scientists a better understanding of the environments around supermassive black holes, particularly less voracious black holes, such as those at the heart of the Milky Way.
(rfi/arh)
2023-12-11 01:51:25
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