Indonesiainside.id, Jakarta – The National Aeronautics and Space Administration recently discovered a tsunami-like eruption in space. This eruption originated from a supermassive black hole.
With the help of computer simulations, the researchers found a model of the tsunami-like structure and shared it on their official Instagram account.
The image is now circulating on the internet, making many people curious.
As per the post, the image shows gas escaping the gravitational pull of the supermassive black hole, producing a tsunami-like structure.
Since being shared, the post has garnered more than a million likes.
A black hole is a region of space where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape through it.
Supermassive black holes are the largest type of black hole, with masses of millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun.
Meanwhile, according to BBC News, astronomers have a new candidate in their search for the black hole closest to Earth.
It is about 1,000 light years, or about 9.5 trillion kilometers from Earth, located in the constellation Telescopium.
It sounds like a long distance, but when compared to the scale of the universe we know, it’s like a house next door neighbor.
A black hole itself is an object that has a very strong gravity, so strong that even light is sucked into it.
Scientists discover black holes by looking at how they interact with a twin star system. One star orbits near the hole, and the other orbits near its partner.
Usually, black holes are discovered by the way they interact wildly with space gas and dust that builds up in fragments.
When a black hole tears the material apart, an abundance of X-rays is emitted. That’s the high-energy signal detected by the telescope, not the black hole itself.
So what happened this time was an unusual case. Namely through the movement of a twin star system known as HR 6819 that revealed this black hole.
“It might be called a ‘dark black hole’, meaning it’s really black,” said Dietrich Baade, astronomer emeritus at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching, Germany.
“We think this may be the first case of a black hole being discovered in this way. And not only that, it’s the closest black hole,” he told the BBC.
One of the most interesting things about this black hole is the possibility to see HR 6819 with the naked eye assuming that you can look towards the southern sky.
No telescopes or binoculars needed, although conditions are a bit difficult now because this star system only emerges from behind the sun.
Scientists began studying HR 6819 several years ago while observing the so-called Be star.
This is a star that rotates so rapidly that it nearly rips itself apart. However, due to a number of circumstances, the investigation into him has never been carried out in full, until recently.
The probe was carried out using the 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Scientists managed to find a pair of twin stars. One of the stars – which is in the interior – turns out to be orbiting around something invisible as the center of its orbit.
That object is assumed to be a black hole. The object’s mass is at least four times that of our sun.
Astronomers have discovered about 24 black holes in our galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy, almost all of them related to this growing disk.
But according to statistical calculations, many more black holes have yet to be discovered.
“In the Milky Way galaxy, according to calculations there should be about 100 million black holes. So if a few more black holes are found, the number is still far from that,” Marianne Heida, a postdoctoral researcher at ESO, told the BBC.
The paper describing the discovery was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
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