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NASA / CXC / M. Weiss
A team of scientists discovered a huge black hole, called ASASSN-14li, rotating at least half as fast as light. The "crumbs" left by one of their most recent meals allowed researchers to calculate their turnover rate.
"The black hole event horizon is about 300 times larger than Earth's, but the black hole rotates so fast that it performs a full rotation in about two minutes, compared to 24 hours. that our planet is spinning, "said one of the authors of the study, Ron Remillard of the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), quoted in a statement
ASASSN-14li was discovered in November 2014 after destroying a nearby star, as shown in the illustration above.The dramatic event caused a flash of bright light, detected by a system of optical telescopes called ] All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), an international project.
Located in the heart of a galaxy 290 million light years from Earth, the black hole has between 1 and 10 million times the mbad of the sun.It is also rob the black hole that inhabits the nucleus of the Milky Way, called Sagittarius A *, which contains about 4 million solar mbades.
In the new study published last week in the journal Science Science the MIT team observed X-ray light from ASASSN-14li, badyzing data collected by various instruments, including the space telescopes of the Chandra X-ray observatory and the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory and the XMM-Newton satellite of the European Space Agency, ESA [19659007] This dataset revealed constant oscillation: ASASSN-14li X-ray emissions increased and decreased every 131 seconds. This signal is probably due to a group of stars that surround the black hole very close to the horizon of its events.
"The fact that we can trace this region of brilliant X-ray emission while circling the black hole allows -We follow the speed with which the disk material rotates", said the principal author in a statement. Therefore, these broadcasts give us information "on the speed of rotation of the supermbadive black hole itself," he said.
This rotation speed is impressive, but not unprecedented.
Importance of the study
The results of this study could help astronomers better understand how it is possible for supermbadive black holes to evolve. These giant objects are thought to develop in two main ways: by fusions of galaxies or by the constant aggregation of small fragments of surrounding materials.
A relatively low turnover rate would imply the merger process. as a major factor, because these random junctions would probably not continue to revolve around the black hole growing in the same direction. On the other hand, a fast turning black hole tells us, perhaps, that the continuous accretion of the material is dominant.
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