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Credit: NASA/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State University
Astronomers have come across two supermassive black holes in a distant galaxy that are emitting a rare burst of light. This bright emission, which appears to be above normal, could be caused by a black hole duo impacting a large gas cloud – an event that researchers say is the first of its kind to be seen.
The cosmic behemoths reside in the center of the galaxy called 2MASX J21240027+3409114, which is one billion light-years away in the northern constellation of Cygnus. This black holes complete an orbit once every 130 days at a distance of only 16 billion miles (26 billion kilometers) – so close that it takes light only the sun to travel between them. In the last 3 years, they have used up to 1.5 to 2 solar gurus from the gas orbiting cloud, and they are expected to collide and merge in about 70,000 years. a new lesson published November 13 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Astronomers were first alerted to the emissions in March 2021 by an automatic alert system that uses data from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in California to detect rapidly warming objects in the northern sky. Initially, this event was classified as a possible supernova due to the sudden bright light. However, a subsequent eruption in 2022 prompted the study team to explore other explanations.
This phenomenon was quickly relabeled as an active galactic nucleus (AGN), the term used for a black hole that eats material from the surrounding accretion disk. However, observations from observatories in Mexico, India and Spain followed a striking M-pattern in the data that repeated every two to three months, a cadence that supernova or AGN could explain.
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“This is unlike anything I’ve seen before,” study lead author Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics in Chile, told Space.com.
In 2022, Hernández-García and his team observed a similar M-shaped spectral pattern in both X-ray and ultraviolet wavelengths in data from the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. “That’s when we said, ‘This is something interesting,'” he said. “I’m looking at the lights a little bit more every day to see what’s going on.”
two glowing points in the dark space swirling together in a wash of orange gas.
So far, the data has not shown any patterns of liquid disruption events, or TDEs, where a star is torn apart by a black hole. the force of gravity. The model fits well with the data showing a large cloud of gas approached the galaxy on a trajectory perpendicular to the orbit of the two black holes. Larger than the binary system itself, the gas cloud would have been torn apart by the massive forces of the black hole. If this is true, the output of M can be explained by the hunks of gas that are injected into it. place each one the time a black hole enters a cloud of gas.
However, researchers have not ruled out the possibility of a previously known type of TDE occurring in the galaxy, Hernández-García said.
In addition, the continued integration of this constellation with another one to its south, about 29,000. light years away, it could be creating a great deal. Astronomers expect newly discovered gas clouds to be common in many galaxies involving black holes, but none have yet been observed. Hernández-García says that the lack of observations has limited applications, and he noted that, since the ZTF started working in 2018, “we are finding a lot of strange things that we cannot see.”
Because of the great distance of the galaxy from The worldtelescopes cannot directly see a cloud of gas or a black hole duo. The study team is now considering new ways to track the gas cloud and determine where it came from – whether it’s in the interstellar system, the product of an ongoing merger, or just passing through.