Astronomers turn a black hole like a high

Scientists around the world have been able to create a short visualization of an active black hole that is wobbling like a peak, according to a new article – an important observation for the field.

Black holes may seem like cosmic vacuum cleaners, but, by sucking the material out of their environment, they can spit streams of high-energy material. This new revolutionary observation has shown that in cases where a star's disc of matter and that of a neighboring black hole are misaligned, the black hole may project jets, giving it the impression of wobbling as a huge peak. a few hours. Scientists hope that understanding this chaotic situation will help them better understand other strange events in the Universe.

"This could include a whole bunch of other brilliant and explosive events in the Universe, such as supermassive black holes feeding very quickly or tidal disruption events, when a black hole tears apart." star, "Gemma Anderson, a university researcher at Curtin University in Australia, said in a press release.

The V404 Cygni system is a system located at 8000 light-years, consisting of a black hole sucking the material of a star. On June 22, 2015, scientists working on 10 radio telescopes around the world measured an explosion of system jets in the space of four hours, likely caused by the issue of consuming black holes very quickly – a cosmic treat. Normally, scientists accumulated all this data to try to create a single image for the observation period, but the emission of black holes changed too quickly. Instead, the researchers produced 103 images, each representing 70 seconds of observation. They then combined these images with data processing and modeling to create their visualization.

The jets seemed to oscillate 30 degrees (one twelfth of pie) in the sky during this period, leaving behind clouds of plasma, according to the article published in Nature.

"We get a lot more this jet precession [rapidly] the author of the study, Gregory Sivakoff, an associate professor of physics at the University of Alberta, told Gizmodo.

The researchers made a short film from the data, showing the plasma clouds that were moving away from the black hole.

What can cause this? Well, black holes have incredibly powerful gravitational fields, and gravity is simply a distortion of space and time. Swirling black holes draw space and time with them. The star and the disc of the material are slightly misaligned with respect to the direction of rotation of the black hole, so that the oscillation occurs. Astronomers then observe the result: the jets in rotation.

Others were excited about the result. "This is a major breakthrough on the ground," Gizmodo Jose Gómez, a researcher at the Astrological Institute of Andalusia (CSIC) in Spain, told Gizmodo. He and Sivakoff both noted that the analysis was complex, given that researchers had to divide the data into smaller segments.

It's cool for a lot of reasons. Scientists hope to understand how these oscillating jets behave around other black holes, like those located at the center of the galaxies, as they could influence star formation, Sivakoff said. And you may remember that earlier this month, Event Horizon telescope scientists launched the very first image of the shadow shadows that black holes cast on the light behind them. The EHT team and this group have both used very long base interferometry in order to transform the Earth itself into a telescope – and both groups now hope to make black hole films evolving over time.

With more observations and better telescopes, we could really have the chance to see a video of black holes engulfing the material one day.