Category: Black Holes

Whether you’re dealing with a stellar mass black hole, or a supermassive black hole at the heart of a galaxy, it appears they consume matter in much the same way. It’s all just an issue of scale. Researchers have studied the accretion disks around both stellar and supermassive black holes, and found they seem to emit the same pattern of X-rays. Because of their size, the supermassive variety consume matter over long periods. By studying the smaller variety, researchers can model what will happen on larger scales.
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ESA’s Integral space observatory has spotted a blast of gamma rays from a suspected black hole in the Milky Way. the outburst occurred on September 17, 2006, and gradually built in brightness over the course of a few days before declining again. It’s this rise and fall of brightness, called a light curve, that allowed astronomers identify the source as a black hole. It’s likely that a disk of gas and material orbiting the black hole became unstable, and a portion of it collapsed, creating the outburst.
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Black holes bend our understanding of the Universe and laws of physics. But astronomers have discovered a black hole spinning so quickly, it breaks all the speed laws for rotation. The stellar mass black hole in question is known as GRS1915+105, and it’s spinning more than 950 times every second. As the black hole spins, it drags the surrounding space around with it, and gives astronomers an opportunity to study some of Einstein’s predictions about relativity.
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Astronomers have discovered gamma rays streaming from the vicinity of the supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87. These gamma rays have energy levels of more than a million million times the energy of visible light. Fortunately, these rays are stopped by our atmosphere. A special instrument called H.E.S.S., located in Namibia, can detect when these rays strike our atmosphere, and trace back the source. Astronomers have determined that a region not much larger than our Solar System around the black hole is responsible for this outpouring of gamma rays; the black hole is acting like a cosmic particle accelerator.
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Astronomers have identified two distant supermassive black holes, or quasars, which might be about to get much brighter. New data from the Spitzer Space Telescopes show that the vicinities around the black holes could be backing up with excess matter – the black holes just can’t consume it fast enough to clear the space. When this happens, the matter heats up, and releases a tremendous amount of energy. Some theories propose that these explosions could be so powerful they stop star formation in a galaxy.
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Ever wonder how many black holes are nearby? Well, NASA has gone and counted them for you. According to data gathered by NASA’s Swift satellite, there are about 200 supermassive black holes within about 400 million light-years of the Earth. Swift’s first job is to scan the skies for gamma ray bursts, but during downtime, the spacecraft hunts for objects that emit X-rays. And supermassive black holes are one of the most powerful sources of X-rays out there.
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Black holes might be invisible, but the superheated matter piling up around them shines brightly in the gamma ray spectrum. Most of these black holes are so far away, their gamma rays look like a diffuse background radiation that covers the sky. ESA’s Integral spacecraft recently calibrated the level of this background radiation by watching a point of sky, and let the Earth pass in front of it, to slowly block it out. Using these calculations, astronomers will be better able to distinguish point sources of gamma rays from the wash of background radiation.
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Although black holes can’t be seen directly, they’re relatively easy to find. Matter spiraling into a black hole becomes superheated, shines brightly, and is visible across the Universe. A new supercomputer simulation has fine tuned the energy calculations for atoms in the vicinity of a black hole. This is very important, because astronomers working on black holes will base their assumptions on these atomic data. The new calculations bring the potential error rates down to a few percent, enhancing the accuracy of other research.
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