Supermassive black holes are thought to lurk hungrily at the hearts of perhaps all the large galaxies in the Universe. These voracious gravitational beasts can weigh millions to billions of times more than our star, the Sun, and they greedily feed on copious bits of hapless stars and/or gas spinning too close to their claws. In December 2013, a team of astronomers announced that they had seen what appears to be a pair of supermassive black holes dancing around each other in the dark heart of a remote galaxy. The incredibly rare discovery of this Cosmic Macabre dance was made with the invaluable help of NASA Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Follow-up observations were made using the Australian telescope compact set near Narrabri, Australia, and the Gemini South Telescope in Chile. These observations revealed strange behavior in the distant galaxy, including a lumpy jet that astronomers believe was caused by one black hole influencing the other’s jet to move like a ribbon in the wind.
Tea INTELLIGENT The satellite surveyed the entire sky twice in infrared wavelengths before putting it into hibernation in 2011. NASA gave the highly productive spacecraft a second chance at life when it awoke from its deep sleep to explore our Solar System for asteroids on a mission called NEOWISE.
“We think the jet from one black hole is being moved by the other, like a dance with ribbons,” Dr. Chao-Wei Tsai explained in a December 3, 2013 NASA statement. Press release from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Dr. Tsai, of JPL in Pasadena, California, is the lead author of a study describing the findings appearing in the December 10, 2013, issue of Tea Astrophysical Journal. “If so, it is likely that the two black holes are quite close and gravitationally entangled,” he added.
The dance of this loving couple could teach astronomers more about how supermassive black holes merge and thus achieve their extraordinarily heavy masses.
“Weird things can be real things”
Astronomers have known for more than a decade that perhaps every great galaxy in the Cosmos has a heart of darkness, home to a supermassive black hole, lurking in a sinister secret, waiting for its next meal. Anything that travels too close to the sinister gravitational embrace of these objects is doomed and cannot escape the clutches of their ferocious gravity, not even light.
In the 18th century, John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace suggested that these strange objects could exist in the Universe, and Albert Einstein General Theory of Relativity he later predicted the existence of entities that possessed gravitational fields so strong that any unfortunate enough to travel too close to them would be consumed. However, the prospect of the reality of such objects seemed so improbable that Einstein rejected the concept, despite his own calculations indicating otherwise. However, scientists realized that these gravitational beasts really do exist in nature. Like Dr. Robert P. Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) He once said: “Strange things can be true things.”
In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild calculated the first modern solution to Einstein’s problem. General relativity that it could describe black holes, though its interpretation as a region of space from which absolutely nothing could escape to freedom was not understood for another 40 years. In fact, black holes were considered mere mathematical oddities for decades. It was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed that black holes are a generic prediction of General relativity.
Supermassive black holes are mysterious and puzzling. This is mainly because they apparently already existed when the Universe was very old. Stars and gas swirling around, then down, down, down, never to return from the whirlwind that surrounds these dark-hearted beasts, are thought to create a falling, swirling storm of material: a huge disk, called the disk. accretion disk. This material becomes hotter and hotter and emits a rush of radiation, especially as it approaches the point of no return, the innermost region of the disk, called the event horizon.
The further we look into Space, the further back we look in Time. This is because the more distant a luminous object is, the longer its wonderful light has taken to reach Earth. No signal in the Universe can travel faster than light in a vacuum, and light from bright, remote objects in the Cosmos cannot wander toward us faster than this universal speed limit. A large population of supermassive black holes already existed in the ancient Universe and, lurking in the heart of the most distant and ancient of galaxies, they reveal their hungry presence in the form of a proud light. Quasi-stellar objectsgold quasarsthat are especially voracious, youthful Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). quasars are fed by bright accretion disks, and many astronomers think they caught fire when our Universe was still in its infancy.
Supermassive black holes can become at least as big as our Solar System. These incredible items are notable for their heavy weight, messy table manners, and greed. When its external power supply runs out, a quasar dims and then turns off. Most galaxies probably went through a quasar stage in their youth, and now these galaxies contain a sleeping beast in their quieter, older hearts.
Macabre dance!
The December 2013 study was based on previously published information derived from the whole sky. INTELLIGENT date. Astronomers carefully studied images of literally millions of hungry and active supermassive black holes that inhabit our entire sky.
Then they saw the “weirdo”! He jumped at them from the INTELLIGENT date. They named the strange beast WISE J233237.05-505643.6.
“At first we thought that the unusual properties of this galaxy seen by INTELLIGENT it could mean that it was forming new stars at a dizzying rate. But on closer inspection, it looks more like the death spiral of merging giant black holes,” noted Dr. Peter Eisenhardt on December 3, 2013. JPL press release. Dr. Eisenhardt is INTELLIGENT project manager at JPL.
It has been a long-standing mystery how supermassive black holes grow to be so large, with masses up to billions of suns. One way they could become so obese is by gobbling up surrounding stellar and gaseous materials. A second way could result from “galactic cannibalism,” in which a larger galaxy consumes a smaller galaxy that has come too close to it, black hole and all. When galaxies collide, their supermassive beasts plunge into the heart of the new galactic structure and then dance together in a kind of gravitational tango. Ultimately, they merge into a single, even heavier black hole.
stocosmic Macabre dance it begins slowly, with the two dancers circling each other at a wary distance of roughly a few thousand light-years. At this point, only a small number of supermassive black holes have been confirmed to be circling in this early stage of inevitable merger. As the black holes continue to spiral towards each other, while their flirtatious, strange dance continues, they grow closer and closer, separated by only a few light-years.
Close-dancing black holes, called black Hole Binaries, have proven to be the most difficult for astronomers to detect. These strange objects are normally too small to be resolved by even the most technologically advanced telescopes currently available. Only a few strong candidates have been observed to date, and all of them are relatively close to us. However, INTELLIGENT J233237.05-505643.5 is a new and strong candidate! It also lives much further away than others of its kind, at a truly impressive distance of 3.8 billion light-years from our planet.
radio images derived from Australian telescope compact set it proved crucial in discovering the strange dual nature of this mysterious and distant object. Supermassive beasts, which dwell at the heart of galaxies, normally emit pencil-straight jets. However, in the case of WISE J233237.05-505643.5, the stream zigzags. Astronomers believe that a second black hole could be altering the shape of the jet.
Visible light spectral data obtained from the Gemini South Telescope it revealed similar deformities that could have resulted from one black hole causing material from the disk surrounding the other to accumulate. Taken together, these observations indicate what is likely to be a pair of closely circling black holes. Although, at this point, astronomers cannot pinpoint the exact distance that separates the two dancing couples.
In the end, the merging supermassive black holes are predicted to send out gravitational waves that ripple through the fabric of space-time. Astronomers diligently search for signs of these waves using assemblages of stellar corpses called press (yarn neutron stars) in his quest to learn more about how black holes dance.
“We observe some caution in interpreting this mysterious system. There are several extremely unusual properties of this system, from multiple radio jets to the Gemini data, indicating a highly disturbed disk of material accreted around the black hole or holes. Two merging black holes, which should be a common event in the Universe, would seem to be the simplest explanation to explain all current observations,” noted Dr. Daniel Stern on December 3, 2013. JPL press release. Dr. Stern is a co-author of the study.