Ring made of black holes? Massive cosmic structure found surrounding the distant galaxy

Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope have spotted a massive ring encircling a distant galaxy in the cosmos.

The strange structure, discovered from a series of X-ray sources, is present around a galaxy named AM 0644-741. It is about 300 million light-years away from us and would have formed as a result of a collision between AM 0644 and another smaller galaxy.

NASA recently released a composite plan, created by combining optical and X-ray images of Hubble and Chandra, presenting the ring and galaxies in question.

Composite image of the cosmic ring seen 300 million light years from Earth. According to scientists, this structure could accommodate black holes or neutron stars. Photo: X-ray: NASA / CXC / INAF / A. Wolter et al; Optics: NASA / STScI

According to the space agency, the ring formed as the galaxy on the lower left collided with the right one – AM 0644. It was pulled by the gravitational force of the latter, which probably created ripples of gas. with fast star training.

Among the newborn stars, the most massive have probably led a short life, on a scale of millions of years. They lost their nuclear fuel over time and exploded into supernovae, where most of the stellar material is washed away, leaving black holes 5 to 20 times heavier than the sun or dense neutron stars carrying roughly the same mass than the sun.

This indicates that the ring is either black holes in stellar mass, or neutron stars accompanied by nearby companion stars. The dense objects draw gas from their stellar counterparts, forming a very hot rotating disk that acts as a detectable X-ray source for Chandra.

Although the researchers behind this discovery – a team from the INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Italy – could not confirm the identity of the various sources making up the discovery. ring, they think that it could work from all the black holes or all the neutron stars. or a mixture of both.

That being said, it should also be noted that the X-ray emissions detected since AM 0644 are one hundred to one thousand times more intense than those observed from other binary systems hosting a star in orbit around a neutron star or a star. 'a black hole.

As predicted by the team, this could be an effect of the rapid growth of black holes or neutron stars, or geometric effects resulting from the fall of stellar material. Some sources of X-rays in the ring also come from objects in the background or in the galaxy. For example, a fast-growing black hole that lies behind the galaxy, more than nine billion light-years away from Earth or the supermassive black hole at its center.

The results of the work, which also included Chandra's observations of six other galaxies, could ultimately help scientists understand the effects of massive galactic collisions in the cosmos.

The study, titled "The X-ray Brightness Function of Ultra-bright X-ray Sources in Colliding Ring Galaxies," was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal.