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First monster black hole ever photographed erupts with surprise burst of gamma rays

Pabio December 17, 2024

In 2018, it was revealed that a pioneering Earth-sized telescope had taken, for the first time, an image of a black hole. That same instrument, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), has now witnessed the same black hole erupt with a powerful and unexpected explosion. Scientists hope that by studying this emission, they can better model the structure surrounding supermassive black holes.

The eruption, which lasted approximately three days in April and May 2018, occurred from supermassive black hole designated M87*who lies in the heart of galaxy M87located approximately 55 million light years away. The 25 ground and orbiting telescopes that make up the ISE saw the explosion as a high-energy light called gamma rays.

Not only was this the first time M87* had erupted since 2010, but the flare was also more energetic than typical flares from this black hole.

Supermassive black holes are thought to exist at the centers of all large galaxies, including our own, the Milky Way.

M87* stands out from the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Our supermassive black hole has a mass equal to that of about 4.3 million suns, while M87* has a mass equal to about 5.4 million suns. billion suns!

But M87* also differs from Sgr A* because this more distant black hole is to feed voraciously. This power is responsible for jets connected to high-energy flares, like the gamma ray flare spotted by the EHT in 2018.

“Together with the submillimeter observations of the EHT, the new data collected in multiple radiation bands provide a unique opportunity to understand the properties of the gamma ray emission “These observations can shed light on some of the main questions in astrophysics,” Giacomo Principe, project leader and researcher at the University of Trieste, said in a statement. which are still not resolved.

“How are the powerful relativistic jets observed in certain galaxies born? Where are the particles responsible for emitting gamma rays accelerated? What phenomenon accelerates them to energies of several billion electron volts? What is the origin of these relativistic jets? cosmic rays?”

Black holes are messy eaters

What really sets black holes apart is the preponderance of matter surrounding them. While some like Sgr A* exist in relatively empty pantries (if our black hole were a human, it would exist on a diet of one grain of rice every million years), others like M87* have an abundance of material to feed on.

Yet although our image of a black hole is that of an all-consuming, all-devouring cosmic titan from which nothing escapes, supermassive black holes like M87* are actually quite different. useless eaters. Like cranky toddlers, most of the food intended for these black holes ends up violently rejected.

The matter surrounding supermassive black holes exists as a flattened cloud called an accretion disk and as a superheated gas called a “plasma” because it still has angular momentumor turn. This angular momentum also means that this plasma cannot fall directly onto the black hole; instead, it swirls around the central supermassive black hole and is gradually fed into it.

However, supermassive black holes are also surrounded by powerful magnetic fields. These channel material from the accretion disk towards the poles of the black hole. At some point, these particles are accelerated to near-light speeds and are projected as high energy jets.

These jets are accompanied by bursts of electromagnetic radiation like the gamma ray flare witnessed by the EHT.

A bright orange ring below which are three orange jets of increasing opacity with a new solid blue at the bottom.

Light curve of the gamma flare (bottom) and collection of near-simultaneous images of the M87 jet (top) at different scales obtained by radio and X-ray during the 2018 campaign. (Image credit: EHT Collaboration, Fermi-LAT Collaboration, HESS Collaboration, MAGIC Collaboration, VERITAS Collaboration, EAVN Collaboration)

The energetic explosion of M87* seen by the EHT showed that the near-light-speed jet erupting around this black hole extends a surprising distance.

The jet is tens of millions of times larger than the black hole itself. The difference in size is so great that it looks like a blue whale grown from a single bacteria.

How black holes launch these jets still remains a mystery, one that EHT scientists hope these observations could help unravel.

“In particular, these results offer the first-ever chance to identify the point at which the particles causing the flare are accelerated, which could potentially resolve a long-standing debate over the origin of cosmic rays (particles of very high energy) coming from space detected on Earth,” Principe continued.

A blue and green sphere surrounded by images from worldwide telescopes and space instruments

Observatories and telescopes that participated in the 2018 multi-band campaign to detect the high-energy gamma-ray flare from the M87* black hole. (Image credit: EHT Collaboration, Fermi-LAT Collaboration, HESS Collaboration, MAGIC Collaboration, VERITAS Collaboration, EAVN Collaboration)

EHT is all about collaboration between instruments, and these results are a striking example.

In addition to the telescopes already combining to turn the EHT into an Earth-sized telescope, this campaign has looked to space instruments like Fermi, NuSTAR, Chandra, And Fast.

“Fermi-LAT revealed a notable increase in flux over the same period as other observatories, helping to identify the region of gamma-ray emission during these increases in brightness,” said Elisabetta Cavazzuti, director of Fermi. “M87 It is a laboratory which demonstrates once again the importance of having coordinated observations at several wavelengths and also well sampled to fully characterize the spectral variability of the source, variability which probably extends over different time scales, with the broadest possible vision, complete across the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Through collaboration between these and other telescopes, scientists were able to see a clear change in the angle of the jet relative to M87’s core. This seems to happen on an annual basis.

The team also noticed correlated changes in the event horizonthe outer limit of each black hole that traps light. This suggests a connection between event horizons and the powerful jets launched by black holes.

“In the first image “During the 2018 observation campaign, it was found that this ring was not homogeneous and therefore presented asymmetries (i.e. brighter areas),” Principe concluded. “Subsequent observations made in 2018 and linked to this publication, scientific studies confirmed the data, but pointed out that the position angle of the asymmetry had changed.

The team’s research was published Friday, December 13, in the journal Astronomy and astrophysics.

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