According to RT, throughout the year, astronomers have mined new information about black holes across the universe, and here’s a list of black holes that surprised us in 2022.
A previously unknown black hole revealed its existence to astronomers when it ripped apart and gobbled up a nearby moving star.
The violent disturbance came from a black hole of intermediate mass between about 100,000 and one million times the mass of the Sun in the dwarf galaxy SDSS J152120.07 + 140410.5, about 850 million light-years from Earth.
The star-shattering event, known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, produced a radiation wave that briefly dimmed the host dwarf galaxy’s combined starlight, which could help scientists better understand the relationship between holes in black galaxies.
This “violent wave disturbance event” has been dubbed AT 2020neh. Astronomers have previously used “violent wave perturbation events” to measure the mass of supermassive black holes, which range in size from millions to billions of solar masses.
However, AT 2020neh is the first time that a violent wave disruption event has helped analyze the masses of small intermediate-mass black holes.
Last November, scientists announced the discovery of a new black hole that now holds the record for closest known black hole to Earth.
Gaia BH1, about 10 times more massive than our Sun, is located just 1,560 light-years from our planet.
Gaia BH1 is in a binary system whose other partner is a sun-like star. This star is as far away from its companion black hole as Earth is from the Sun, which makes Gaia BH1 so special.
Astronomers have discovered the fastest growing black hole ever, devouring the equivalent of Earth (planet Earth) one per second. It appears to be the fastest growing black hole in the past nine billion years.
The mass of the supermassive black hole, called J1144, is currently three billion times the mass of the Sun, making it 500 times more massive than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.
The matter ejected from the black hole’s surface creates a quasar — the extremely bright heart of a galaxy — that emits enough energy to make it 7,000 times brighter than the light from any star in the Milky Way.
4. A very distant black hole is sending a mysterious flash to Earth
Last November, astronomers found the best-known example of a distant black hole tearing apart a star, thanks to a flash of exploding stellar “leftovers” directly on Earth.
The event, called AT2022cmc, occurred about 8.5 billion light-years away and started flashing when the 13.8-billion-year-old universe was only a third of its current age.
Scientists estimated that the black hole ate about half of the sun’s mass each year.
In about 1% of these violent disruption events, known as violent wave perturbation (TDE) events, the black hole shoots jets of plasma and radiation from its poles.
In the year 2022, three years after a black hole cooked and ate a “dinner” from a star, scientists spotted the giant object again by belching the remains of its meal.
The strange event began in 2018 when scientists saw a small star being torn apart by a black hole in a galaxy about 665 million light-years from Earth. Three years later, the black hole was found to be spewing matter from its last meal.
“This completely surprised us: No one had ever seen anything like this before,” Yvette Sendes, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the study, said in a statement from the star she ate years ago.
Last March, astronomers revealed that what was thought to be the closest black hole to Earth doesn’t actually exist.
And in 2020, astronomers uncovered evidence that HR 6819, just 1,000 light-years from Earth, was a triple system, with one star orbiting a black hole and another star in a wide orbit. However, other scientists have disputed the findings and this year managed to disprove their existence.
Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), they were able to produce more detailed images of HR 6819 and found that it has only two stars in a close orbit and no black holes. One star displaces the other’s mass, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “stellar vampirism.”
7. The number of black holes in the universe Last January, astronomers announced that the observable universe could contain 40,000,000,000,000,000,000 stellar-mass black holes, the equivalent of 40 quintillion, or 40 billion billion.
Collectively, these black holes make up 1% of all natural matter in the visible universe, which is 93 billion light-years in diameter.
Scientists from the International College for Advanced Studies (SISSA) have used a new computational approach to estimate the number of such holes believed to have formed.
By analyzing the evolution of stars in the universe, scientists have estimated how often stars, alone or in binaries, will transform into stellar-mass black holes, those 5 to 10 times the mass of the Sun.
The team found that larger stellar-mass black holes usually form from the collision of smaller black holes within star clusters, an idea that fits well with gravitational-wave data collected so far on hole collisions. blacks.
