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A new model suggests that the fusion of supermassive black holes will shine in strange ultraviolet rays and X-rays as they will turn into an inevitable crash.
According to a statement by NASA, supermassive black holes represent millions or billions of times the mass of the sun and reside in just about every galaxy the size of our Milky Way at least. Scientists know that galaxies usually combine; this will happen with the Milky Way and Andromeda, for example, in about 4 billion years.
"We know that galaxies with central supermassive black holes are combining all the time in the universe, but we only see a small fraction of galaxies with two [black holes] Scott Noble, an astrophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center at NASA in Maryland, said in a statement. [No Escape: Dive Into a Black Hole (Infographic)]
Scientists have already witnessed mergers of black holes, but they were much smaller, according to the statement – comparable to the size of a star, or between three and a few dozen times the mass of the sun. These star-sized black hole mergers were detected with the aid of the National Science Foundation's Laser Gravitational Wave Interferometer (LIGO) observatory. Scientists found them by detecting gravitational waves, which are space-time ripples generated after these large fusions.
Supermassive black hole mergers will be harder to spot, NASA officials said in the statement, as they are often far more distant from each other and emit weaker gravitational wave signals. To detect this tiny signal, the detectors must be located in the space in order to avoid being disturbed by seismic waves on our own planet. A space antenna (LISA), to be launched in the 2030s, could be a future mission.
This snapshot from a NASA simulation shows the brilliance of two supermassive black holes that spiral up in a collision.
Credit: Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA
There is, however, another possible method for finding supermassive fusions. When galaxies merge, they bring with them collections of gas, dust, stars and planets. When the collision occurs, much of this material is drawn into the black holes – which then begin to "eat" the material, generating radiation that astronomers should be able to see (before the material crosses the horizon black hole events).
The new simulation followed what happens on three orbits of supermassive black holes that are about 40 orbits from a complete fusion. The model suggests that at this stage of fusion, there would be UV rays and high-energy X-rays visible in telescopes.
"Three regions of light-emitting gas glow when melting black holes, all connected by hot gas streams: a large ring surrounding the entire system, called a circumbinary disk, and two smaller ones around each black hole, called mini-disks, "NASA officials said.
"All these objects emit mainly UV light," the officials said. "When the gas enters at high speed in a mini-disk, the UV light of the disk interacts with the crown of each black hole, [which is] a region of high energy subatomic particles above and below the disk. This interaction produces X-rays. When the accretion rate is lower, the ultraviolet light fades away from X-rays. "
The simulation suggests that X-rays in a fusion of supermassive black holes will be brighter and more variable than the X-rays observed in supermassive solitary black holes. (The changes concern the velocity of the gas around the orbits of the black holes, as well as the orbits of the black fusing holes themselves.)
The simulation was performed at the Blue Waters supercomputer of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This particular simulation estimated the gas temperatures, while future simulations will incorporate parameters such as temperature, total mass and distance to see the effects on the light emitted by the fusion, the statement said.
The new work was detailed yesterday (October 2) in The Astrophysical Journal.
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