A team of astronomers has managed to calculate the rotation speed of a distant supermassive black hole, thanks to an object that happened to meet a star and was immediately destroyed.
All black holes have spin, which develops through interactions with other matter in the universe. As black holes accrete matter and grow, they can spin faster. When it grows by merging with other large bodies, it tends to slow down. In a recent study, researchers were able to estimate the rotation of a supermassive black hole by measuring the wobble of its accretion disk after the star is destroyed (politely meant torn apart) by a massive object. Successful. They found that the black hole rotates less than 25% of the speed of light, at least slow for a black hole. The team’s research Published In nature today.
“The rotation of a black hole is tied to its evolution. For example, black holes that have grown by steadily accumulating gas over billions of years tend to rotate quickly, but “Black holes that grow through mergers should have slower rotation speeds,” Dheeraj Pasham, an MIT astronomer and lead author of the new paper, said in an email to Gizmodo.
Black Hole A region of spacetime with a very strong gravitational field. Not even the light can escape them Beyond a certain point, called the event horizon. But black holes also pull in a lot of material into their surroundings. This is amazing, as it allows researchers to study the physics of these shadowy giants. This material (a collection of rocky debris, dust, and gas) is the black hole’s accretion disk, and its bright glow allows the Event Horizon Telescope to: Imaging the shadow of a black hole directly.
“There are other modes by which supermassive black holes, and therefore their host galaxies, can grow over time, and each mode has specific predictions for the spin distribution,” Pasham added. “So if we can measure the spin disturbances of supermassive black holes, we can constrain how they (and their host galaxies) have grown over cosmic time.”
Occasionally, an unfortunate star gets too close to a black hole and gets caught in its tidal forces, getting ripped to shreds. Some of the star may be flung out into space, while others may get elongated into the abundant, superheated stellar material and become part of the black hole’s accretion disk.
The spinning giant was discovered in February 2020, when the Zwicky Transient Facility detected a flash of light from an object a billion light-years away from Earth. Using NASA’s NICER telescope, which observes the universe at X-ray wavelengths, researchers studied the source, which they thought was a tidal disruption event, over 200 days.
The group found that X-ray emissions from the source peaked every 15 days. This led the researchers to conclude that these peaks occurred when the accretion disk was directly aligned with the telescope. The researchers worked backwards from this apparent wobble in the accretion disk to account for the approximate mass of the black hole and the mass of the star from which it skimmed material. They arrived at an estimate of the rotation of the black hole itself.
This is not the first time that the rotation of a black hole has been calculated. 2019 team including Pasham I found a signal They thought it was associated with a black hole that rotates at about half the speed of light. However, as Parsham told Gizmodo, the nature of that signal is “still a mystery,” but the new measurements correspond to the black hole’s rotation according to related theories. Black holes spinning at a quarter of the speed of light (167,654,156 miles per hour, or 74,948,114 meters per second) are still very fast in our simple human terms, but they are some of the most extreme celestial objects You need to remember that. In space.
Pasham added that black holes cannot rotate faster than 94% of the speed of light, or 630,379,631.62 miles (281,804,910.52 meters per second). Kip Thorne did the math. This maximum value is due to the amount of torque on the black hole that is generated by the radiation emitted from the accretion disk and swallowed by the black hole. MIT has also created a helpful video to explain the new discovery. You can see it below.
Flashes of X-rays from far-flung objects in space are often a sign of black holes, down to the usual shenanigans. In 2021, a team including Pasham discovered that a strange object in space known as the “Cow” was A black hole is bornIn 2022, another flash of light was observed from an object 8.5 billion light years away. The most distant tidal disruption event ever observedAnd then we saw that black hole shoot a jet of superheated material directly at Earth.
The research team plans to continue cataloging tidal disruption phenomena with the goal of understanding the spin distribution of supermassive black holes. The road to understanding the black hole universe is long, but deciphering its physics could help unravel some of the universe’s biggest mysteries.
more: Astronomers discover the most massive stellar black hole in the Milky Way
