The material accelerated to a black hole at 30% of the speed of light

After going beyond the event horizon – the point of no return – nothing can escape a black hole. While the depths of black holes remain forever a mystery, astronomers can observe the regions around them. In an article published on September 3 in the Monthly Notices from the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers reported, for the first time, that particles fell directly into a distant black hole, at nearly a third of the speed of light.

The observations, which come from the XMM-Newton X-ray observatory in orbit around the European Space Agency, concern the supermassive black hole of 40 million solar masses at the center of the galaxy PG211 + 143, at about a billion light years away. PG211 + 143 is a Seyfert galaxy, which means that it hosts a bright black hole and actively feeding its center with gases and dust from its environment. By distributing X-ray light received from this material by wavelength, researchers led by Ken Pounds of the University of Leicester have detected a mass of material falling in the black hole at 30% of the speed of light – about 56,000 miles per second. kilometers per second). "We were able to track a mass of matter the size of the Earth for about a day because it was pulled toward the black hole, accelerating up to one third of the speed of light before it went off. to be engulfed by the hole, "said Pounds. Press release.

Curiously, the foolproof gas showed no rotation – it did not move the same way as the largest accretion disk that shone around the black hole – from its initial distance to about 20 times the size of the black hole when He was spotted for the first time.

Rules of chaos

The traditional "photo" of a black hole has a compact and massive object in the center, surrounded by a hot gas disk. This is because the black holes are so small compared to the mass they contain, that the infallible material simply can not sink into the black hole: it forms a swirling disk, like water move closer to the black hole to fall into it. As matter moves from the outer disc to the event horizon, it loses potential gravitational energy, which is converted into radiation and astronomers can observe.

In this traditional image, material orbits inside the accretion disk are supposed to align with the spin of the black hole itself, forming a single disk. But from this perspective, this observation in which the infallible subject has shown little rotation is confusing – at least until the introduction of recent computer models also developed at the University of Leicester and using the installation of DiRAC supercomputers. UK.

The theory and models take into account that matter can fall to a black hole in any direction. Maybe instead of a single disc, misaligned accretion discs can form when the material comes into play. The material can then "come off" from these discs, forming rings. of material that collide. directly into the black hole – as astronomers have observed.