A black hole & # 39; malnourished & # 39; breaks all the rules | MNN



[ad_1]

Black holes do not easily give up their secrets.

Despite decades of scientific speculation, we only cast our eyes on it at the beginning of this year, when astronomers finally captured an image of Powehi – a Hawaiian term meaning "ornate". a dark and unfathomable creation ".

And now, scientists have detected another supermassive black hole that is even more "unfathomable". In fact, it breaks the few rules we expect, even the black holes.

The light suction anomaly, described in a recently published study, lies at the heart of the NGC 3147 spiral galaxy, about 130 million light-years away from your current position. Further, of course, the better. This supermassive black hole is very hungry. In fact, researchers say that malnutrition is due to the fact that it does not find enough material to be sucked into its gaping mouth.

And yet, despite the meager offers galactic buffet, this hungry hippopotamus has a flat disc and compact material embedded in its gravitational field. The material revolves around the black hole of 3147 at a frantic pace of about one tenth of the speed of light.

Artistic representation of the black hole of galaxy NGC 3147.
Artistic representation of the black hole in galaxy NGC 3147. (Photo: NASA, ESA, A. Feild and L. Hustak)

As NASA explains in a press release, this type of disc usually accompanies a clogged black hole – a hole that feeds heavily on its environment. And yet, this black hole, despite about 250 million times the mass of our sun, is weak and hungry.

Indeed, it took a very thorough scan of the Hubble Space Telescope imagery spectrograph to even detect its presence.

"Without Hubble, we would not have been able to see this because the black hole region has low light," said study co-author Marco Chiaberge of the Space Agency in the NASA press release. "The luminosities of the stars of the galaxy surpass everything in the nucleus, so if you look at it from the ground, you are dominated by the brightness of the stars, which drowns the weak emission of the nucleus."

To answer this question, it goes without saying that we may still have to turn to Albert Einstein. Specifically, researchers want to test his theories of relativity on the galactic carnivore. The brilliant and misquoted German physicist has, after all, predicted that black holes existed long before we found them.

His theories of relativity, tested on the improbable gas disk of this black hole, could give astronomers unprecedented insight into the so-called "unfathomable" processes that take place near a black hole.

"It's an intriguing look on a disc very close to a black hole, so narrow that the velocities and intensity of gravitational attraction affect the appearance of light photons, "said co-author of the study, Stefano Bianchi, of the Italian University Roma Tre. in the press release. "We can only understand the data if we include the theories of relativity."

It seems that this black hole can defy most of today's astronomical theories. He can even challenge the rules of existence itself. But we will have to wait and see if it can challenge Einstein.

For the moment, here is a top view of this very strange record:

A black hole & # 39; malnourished & # 39; breaks all the rules

Astronomers can not explain why a faded black hole has such a dense and flat disc.

[ad_2]

Source link