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On June 17, the Atlas telescopes (last warning system for the earth 's impact of the asteroid) in Hawaii captured a strange anomaly 200 million light years from Earth. In the constellation Hercules, an absurdly bright object ignites and disappears quickly.
The phenomenon intrigues the astronomical community. Under the direction of astrophysicist Raffaella Margutti, a professor and researcher at Northwestern University in the United States and a member of the Ciera Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics, an international team of scientists has come to an likely conclusion: the telescope lenses the first time, the birth of a black hole – or at least a neutron star.
The abnormal observed object – technically a supernova or hypernova – was named AT2018cow. Informally, The Cow.
"We think the cow is the formation of a black hole or a neutron star," says astrophysicist Margutti. "We know, in theory, that black holes and neutron stars are formed when a star dies, but we have never seen them before they were born."
The study was presented this Thursday at the Astronomical Society. American, Washington, United States.
According to NASA, the US Space Agency, it is thought that primordial black holes are those that "formed at the beginning of the universe shortly after the Big Bang".
"Formation occurs when the center of a very mbadive star collapses on itself." This collapse also causes a supernova, a supernova, ” clbad=”img img-responsive image-large”/>
The supernova, in this case, is an astronomical event that occurs at the final stage of the evolution of certain stars. It is a very brilliant explosion, of short duration in the spatial scale. The light effect resembles that of the birth of a star – but the consequence is its definitive erasure. The word supernova for this type of star was invented in 1931 by astronomers Walter Baad (1893-1960) and Fritz Zwicky (1898-1974).
This phenomenon is usually the precedent, hence the formation of a black hole. Stellar Or a neutron star – that's the collapsed core of a star that might or might not become a black hole someday.
Scientists think they have experienced such a transition moment. "Checking this rare event will help astronomers better understand the physics in action at the start of creating a black hole or a neutron star," he said.
The Cow
The discovery of the cow left the astronomical community curious from the first moment.
"What we observed has challenged our current notions of stardom death," he said in a statement to the press. Margutti
The object seen had an abnormal brightness compared to the norms. It was 10 to 100 times brighter than a typical supernova as measured by scientists. In addition, its explosion and disappearance also took place very quickly.
In just 16 days, the object had already emitted its full force. For the universe, where phenomena typically last for millions or even billions of years, this short period is far less than a snap of the fingers.
"We saw that the source went from inactivity to maximum brightness in just a few days". , recalls astrophysics. "It was enough to excite the whole team."
Another curiosity was that at the time of the explosion, its particles reached 30,000 miles per second – or 10% of the speed of light.
Margutti badyzed The Cow with recordings from several observatories – and crossed the data. In her research, she used telescope images from Hawaii, Arizona, USA, and Atacama, Chile.
Subsequent data collected at an observatory in the Canary Islands led astronomers to clbadify The Cow by supernova, or hypernova, by
Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain the phenomenon of luminescence and rapid disappearance of the animal. ;object. Especially since early November, the idea that it was the death of a star – and thus the birth of a black hole – had appeared. What Margutti and the team are now reporting with safer evidence.
Complete technique
The technique used is the key to the research published today. While astronomers traditionally study stellar deaths by optical wave length (that is, with telescopes capturing visible light), the Margutti team also conducted detections at the same time. X-rays, radio waves and gamma rays to "see" the phenomenon.
Thanks to this, they managed to study the phenomenon even long after the disappearance of visible light. To obtain this information, Margutti used observations recorded by NASA's NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Network). It is a space telescope specializing in X-ray data capture.
According to Margutti's badessment, the privileged location of The Cow was a factor that allowed to detect this phenomenon for the first time. After all, in the gigantism of the universe, there must be stars that turn all the time into black holes. However, as she pointed out in her study, there is usually a large amount of material around the black holes of the newborn, which blocks the view of astronomers.
In the case indicated, however, there was 10 times less material around this hole. of the object than normal. And this "cleaning" allowed the devices to directly capture the bright core, then eventually collapsed into a black hole.
"It would have been difficult to verify that it was a normal scenario," explains Margutti. "The cow had little material around, so we could directly observe his" engine "."
Another factor was its relative proximity to the Earth.
"After all, nearly 200 million light-years are close."
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