Black hole misaligned at 8000 light-years from Earth behaving in a way that scientists have never seen before



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A black hole located nearly 8000 light years from Earth has behaved in a strange way and astronomers are fascinated.

Although it was discovered in 1989, the Cygni V404 black hole attracted attention for the first time in the world in 2015 when it was brightening telescopes for two weeks while it was consumed material from a star in orbit.

All of the material was not consumed, however, part of it, overheated by the gravitational force of the black hole, was projected far into space in shiny plasma jets.


Although such explosions are not unusual for black holes, they usually tend to emit through poles and go in the same direction.

However, a closer look at these jets revealed that they seemed to be shooting in a pattern of movement called "procession".

On Monday, in the journal Nature, James Miller-Jones and his team of researchers at the International Radioastronomy Research Center in Australia published their observations on the 2015 event and explained the strange behavior of V404 Cygni. The black hole is misaligned.

"We were amazed by what we saw in this system – it was completely unexpected," said Gregory Sivakoff, of the University of Alberta, in a statement from the University of Alberta. National Observatory of Radioastronomy.

The black hole itself is surrounded by a disc of rotating material of a width of six million kilometers, called accretion disk. As a rule, the disc should rotate on the same axis as the black hole itself, but the strange pattern of the jets shows that in the case of V404 Cygni, this is not the case.

This misalignment was probably caused by the strength of the supernova which created the created Black Hole and which, combined with a phenomenon known as frame slip, creates the type of rotation as the wobble effect.

"This is the only mechanism we can think of that can explain the rapid precession seen in the Cygni V404," Miller-Jones said. Posed for the first time by Albert Einstein as part of his general theory of relativity, frame sliding occurs when the intense gravitational force of the black hole causes space-time around him when he turns. .


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Prof Sivakoff said, "The discovery of this astronomical first has deepened our understanding of how black holes and galaxy formation can work. That tells us a little more about this big question: "How did we get here?"

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