A supermassive black hole has kept astronomers glued to their telescopes for the past few years. First there was a surprise disappearance and now an unstable turning act is observed.
MIT scientists presented these findings at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society and will publish the results in an upcoming paper in Nature. The black hole in question is 1ES 1927+654, which has a mass similar to that of a million suns and is located in a galaxy that is 100 million light years away.
In 2018, astronomers from MIT and elsewhere They observed that the corona of the black hole (a moving, incandescent white plasma cloud) it disappeared suddenly, before being reassembled months later. The brief but dramatic closing It was a novelty in black hole astronomy. Now, members of the MIT team have detected the same black hole showing unprecedented behavior.
Astronomers have detected flashes of X-rays coming from the black hole at an increasing rate. Over a two-year period, the flashes, with millihertz oscillations, increased in frequency from every 18 minutes to every seven minutes. This spectacular acceleration of X-rays had not been observed until now in a black hole.
The researchers believe that the most likely culprit is a spinning white dwarfan extremely compact core of a dead star orbiting the black hole and is dangerously close to its event horizon.
One likely scenario, and one that scientists understand best in terms of the physics involved, involves a reckless white dwarf. “These things are really small and quite compact, and our hypothesis is that this is a white dwarf that is getting so close to the black hole,” Masterson argues.
Based on their models, the researchers estimate that the white dwarf’s mass could be about one-tenth that of the Sun. In contrast, the supermassive black hole itself is on the order of a million solar masses. The white dwarf is practically on the brink of the abyss and is estimated to be just a few million kilometers from the event horizon. However, Researchers predict that the star will not fall into it.
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