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Pair of Supermassive Black Holes Spotted
newly discovered binary supermassive black hole -- by an international team led by Fukun Liu of Peking University -- is not in an active galaxy, but rather, an “ordinary” one. A first of its kind.
Whole populations of quiescent galaxies could be hosting binary black holes in their center, according to study coauthor Stefanie Komossa from Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie. But finding them is difficult since quiescent galaxies have no gas clouds to continuously feed black holes -- which leaves these galaxies’ cores dark. Instead, black holes in quiescent galaxies are fed by “tidal disruption events” that occur sporadically. That’s when the gravity of a black hole rips a star to pieces, giving out a flare of X-rays.
The European Space Agency's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, XMM-Newton, was surveying the sky in a random pattern when, on 10 June 2010, it observed a tidal disruption event in the galaxy SDSS J120136.02+300305.5. Days later, the galaxy was still spilling X-rays into space.
Then something weird happened: The X-rays fell below detectable levels between days 27 and 48 after the discovery. But then they reappeared and continued to follow a more expected fading rate -- as if nothing had happened. "This is exactly what you would expect from a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting one another," Liu explains in a news release.
Liu’s models of black hole binary systems predicted a sudden plunge to darkness, followed by a recovery. The gravity of one black hole can temporarily deprive the other of its fuel to fire X-ray flares.
He calculated two possible configurations: one with an elliptical orbit, the other with a circular one. In both cases, the black holes were only separated by 0.6 milliparsecs, or about 2 thousandths of a light year. (This is about the width of the Milky Way.) Being this close means they’ll eventually spiral together, and in about two million years, they’ll merge into a single black hole.
Binary supermassive black holes can tell astronomers about how galaxies evolved into their present-day shapes and sizes. “The final merger is expected to be the strongest source of gravitational waves in the Universe," Liu says. Here, X-ray slew tracks recorded by XMM-Newton from over 1200 individuals recorded between 2001 and 2012.
@Dem!god @Sidak @chak de INDIA @Indischer @DRAY @thesolar65
@OrionHunter
newly discovered binary supermassive black hole -- by an international team led by Fukun Liu of Peking University -- is not in an active galaxy, but rather, an “ordinary” one. A first of its kind.
Whole populations of quiescent galaxies could be hosting binary black holes in their center, according to study coauthor Stefanie Komossa from Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie. But finding them is difficult since quiescent galaxies have no gas clouds to continuously feed black holes -- which leaves these galaxies’ cores dark. Instead, black holes in quiescent galaxies are fed by “tidal disruption events” that occur sporadically. That’s when the gravity of a black hole rips a star to pieces, giving out a flare of X-rays.
The European Space Agency's X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission, XMM-Newton, was surveying the sky in a random pattern when, on 10 June 2010, it observed a tidal disruption event in the galaxy SDSS J120136.02+300305.5. Days later, the galaxy was still spilling X-rays into space.
Then something weird happened: The X-rays fell below detectable levels between days 27 and 48 after the discovery. But then they reappeared and continued to follow a more expected fading rate -- as if nothing had happened. "This is exactly what you would expect from a pair of supermassive black holes orbiting one another," Liu explains in a news release.
Liu’s models of black hole binary systems predicted a sudden plunge to darkness, followed by a recovery. The gravity of one black hole can temporarily deprive the other of its fuel to fire X-ray flares.
He calculated two possible configurations: one with an elliptical orbit, the other with a circular one. In both cases, the black holes were only separated by 0.6 milliparsecs, or about 2 thousandths of a light year. (This is about the width of the Milky Way.) Being this close means they’ll eventually spiral together, and in about two million years, they’ll merge into a single black hole.
Binary supermassive black holes can tell astronomers about how galaxies evolved into their present-day shapes and sizes. “The final merger is expected to be the strongest source of gravitational waves in the Universe," Liu says. Here, X-ray slew tracks recorded by XMM-Newton from over 1200 individuals recorded between 2001 and 2012.
@Dem!god @Sidak @chak de INDIA @Indischer @DRAY @thesolar65
@OrionHunter
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