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A cloud of cosmic gas has a mysterious gamma “heartbeat” that appears to be synchronized with a nearby black hole.
Using data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and NASA’s Fermi Gamma Space Telescope, an international team of researchers has found the “heartbeat” in a cloud of cosmic gas in the constellation Aquila, the eagle. The cloud is “beating” in rhythm with a miniature black hole about 100 light years away, suggesting the objects are somehow connected, according to a statement from the national research center DESY in Germany.
The black hole is part of a microquasar system known as SS 433, which includes a giant star that is about 30 times the mass of the sun. A microquasar is just a small quasar, the brightest type of object in the universe, which consists of a large black hole that emits extraordinary amounts of light as it engulfs its stellar neighbors. As the two objects orbit SS 433, the black hole attracts matter from the giant star, creating an accretion disk around the black hole.
Related: The strangest black holes in the universe
“This material accumulates in an accretion disk before falling into the black hole, like water in the vortex above a bathtub drain,” said Jian Li, lead author of the study. from the DESY national research center, in the press release. “However, some of this material does not fall down the drain but spurts out at high speed in two narrow jets in opposite directions above and below the rotating accretion disk.”
The jets are made up of high-speed particles and ultra-strong magnetic fields that produce X-rays and gamma rays, which are detected by the Fermi Space Telescope. However, the accretion disc oscillates, or precession, which means the two jets shoot out into space along a spiral path, instead of a straight line, according to the release.
The microquasar SS 433 oscillates with a period of 162 days. Simultaneously, the researchers found the same pattern of behavior in the gamma signal emanating from the discrete gas cloud, which they named Fermi J1913 + 0515. Their results, published August 17 in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest that the show of the gas cloud, or “heartbeat”, is fed by the microquasar.
However, the two objects are relatively far apart, at a distance of about 100 light years. Therefore, further observations are needed to fully understand how the black hole fuels the heartbeat in the gas cloud.
“To find such a clear connection by synchronization, about 100 light years from the microquasar, not even in the direction of the jets is as unexpected as it is amazing,” Li said in the statement. “But how the black hole can fuel the heartbeat of the gas cloud is not clear to us.”
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