Recently a mysterious object redefined everything we thought we knew about black holes. First of all black holes are supposed to suck everything into them, even light. Secondly, the gravity is so strong that it was believed that nothing in the known universe could come out of a black hole.
That all changed when NASA announced that something very large exited a black hole.
So what exactly happened? Well as two of NASA’s space telescopes, which included the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array or (NuSTAR) for short, were observing this particular black hole, a large object very suddenly “launched” itself away from the middle or “corona” of the black hole. Right after this remarkable event a massive pulse of X-ray energy spewed forth from the corona. This event seems to have the scientists of earth completely baffled.
To Fiona Harrison, who is the principal investigator for NuSTAR, made a strong note saying that this type of phenomenon is unheard of and completely changes what we originally thought about how black holes function. Luckily with the level of technology that we as a race have been able to achieve, we were able to record this event. The data from this should provide now, some much-needed clues to just how black holes function and how they are structured.
Saint Mary’s universities, Dan Wilkins says that,
“This is the first time we have been able to link the launching of the corona to a flare. This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe.”
The Milky way is immense, and in a region of our galaxy that is simply called Sagittarius A* has been generating a range of flares just about every 10 days or so. Since the passing of this past year, the activity of these flares has drastically increased, to the point of nearly every day. You may be wondering just what that means. Well, let’s look into the research from the astronomers to see just what they have been able to put together.
Utilizing the resources that the astronomers currently have at their disposal, which is 3 huge space telescopes, they have been able to piece together an extremely fascinating cosmic connection to these flares.
Gabriele Ponti, who is from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics located in Germany, made this interesting comment pertaining to the flares,
“For several years, we’ve been tracking the X-ray emission from Sgr A*. This includes also the close passage of this dusty object. A year or so ago, we thought it had absolutely no effect on Sgr A*, but our new data raise the possibility that that might not be the case.”
So in short, it seems that we have been able to observe a phenomenon that has completely changed how we thought black holes functioned. An object actually exited the corona of the black hole and afterwards a flare of x-ray energy followed suit, leaving us completely baffled.
Just recently a team of researchers were able to measure the mysterious object
With the participation of the University of Granada, a team of researchers have been able to type of structure in the vastness of our solar system, despite it being more than five billion light-years away from the little blue planet we call home.
Just to put this achievement into a different perspective, our galaxy is huge and we have been able to find an object that emits an enormous amount of energy, so much so its energy can be compared to the total energy that is emitted by the entire galaxy.
The researchers were able to achieve this feat, by using the so-called gravitational microlensing effect, which is an incident that is caused by the stars that belong to our galaxy can be utilized to magnify other tiny regions in the quasar that contains this object.
Also, through this process the researchers have been able to measure the innermost edge of the disk of matter or what they call the (accretion disk) that is orbiting around this particular quasar that is called Q2237+0305, which doesn’t necessarily roll off the tongue very well, so another name it goes by is called “Einstein Cross”. Throughout the study of the changes in the type of brightness of the four images of the said quasar.
Researcher from the UGR department of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, Jorge Jiménez Vicente, explains that,
“the breakthrough of this work has been that we’ve been able to detect a structure in the inner edge of such a small disk at such a great distance, thanks to the gravitational microlensing effect. It would be the equivalent to detecting an Euro coin at a distance of more than 100000 kilometers.”
In our galaxy, only 1 in every 500 quasars is generally affected at all by the gravitational microlensing effect. The information that astronomers have gained from this incident will be quite useful in helping us to understand the quasars, which may be essential to helping us understand just how our galaxy was born and even evolved.
“The possibility of detecting high magnification events caused by the gravitational microlensing effect could be applied to thousands of quasars.” -Vicente
When you think about how huge this object is it really makes us wonder what it could possibly be. Let us know in the comment below what theories you have about the object.
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