CWL

Black Hole Powered Jets Plow Into Galaxy

This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a supermassive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF’s Very Large Array (pink).

This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy.

The X-ray data show a different aspect of this galaxy, tracing the location of hot gas. The bright X-rays in the center of the image mark a pool of million-degree gas around the black hole. Some of this material may eventually be consumed by the black hole, and the magnetized, whirlpool of gas near the black hole could in turn, trigger more output to the radio jet.

Most of the low-energy X-rays from the vicinity of the black hole are absorbed by dust and gas, probably in the shape of a giant doughnut around the black hole. This doughnut, or torus blocks all the optical light produced near the black hole, so astronomers refer to this type of source as a hidden or buried black hole. The optical light seen in the image is from the stars in the galaxy.

The Super Massive Black Hole of Sagittarius A*

Astronomers using Herschel have spotted a cloud of incredibly hot gas very close to the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

The supermassive black hole goes by the name of Sagittarius A*, and weighs in at 4 million times the mass of our Sun. It is nearly 30,000 light years away at the very centre of our galaxy, but is still hundreds of times closer than other such black holes, which are usually found at the centres of large galaxies.

Its relative proximity makes it the ideal target for studying these extreme environments in detail, though our view is often obscured by dense clouds of dust draped throughout the Milky Way. By studying it in far-infrared light, Herschel can see through this dust and examine the surroundings of the black hole itself. The black hole is surrounded by a ring of gas around 30 light years across, but right in the centre is a mini spiral of gas flowing inwards.

Herschel observations taken in 2011 and 2012 allowed astronomers to examine the region within around a light year of the black hole itself. The data showed the presence of elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, as well as simple molecules including water, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.

Black Hole Caught Snacking on ‘Super Jupiter’ Planet

In a cosmic first, astronomers have discovered a black hole chowing down on what may be a giant rogue planet.

The supermassive black hole didn’t finish off its meal, which scientists say was either a huge Jupiter-like planet wandering freely through space or a brown dwarf, a strange object that’s larger than a planet yet still too small to trigger the internal fusion reactions required to become a full-fledged star.

“This is the first time where we have seen the disruption of a substellar object by a black hole,” study co-author Roland Walter, of the Observatory of Geneva in Switzerland, said in a statement. “We estimate that only its external layers were eaten by the black hole, amounting to about 10 percent of the object’s total mass, and that a denser core has been left orbiting the black hole.”

Black Hole Firewall: Trouble On The Edge

Ever wondered what happens to things as they are consumed by the black hole, the left over matter of dead stars? For a time, it used to be okay to assume matter was destroyed once it entered into a black hole, spaghettified and all.. but it turned out that this couldn’t be further away from the truth. NewScientists Anil Ananthaswamy has a wonderful 3 page piece getting into full details of this history and what questions scientists are asking now. If you love black holes, this is a definite recommend. Although registration (completely free!) is required to view the whole article. It’s pretty insightful and accurately presents the problems currently being faced with how black holes do what they do:

“Paradoxes are good in physics,” reflects John Preskill. “They help to point the way towards important discoveries.” Quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity offer plenty to choose from. There’s the cat that can be dead and alive at the same time. Or the Back to the Future-style time traveller who kills his own grandfather, rendering his own birth impossible. Or the twins who disagree on their age after one returns from a near light-speed trip to a neighbouring star. Each perplexing scenario forces us to examine the fine print of the problem, thereby advancing our understanding of the theory behind it. A case in point is Einstein, whose own theories came from trying to resolve the paradoxes of his time.

Image: Ring of fireSam Chivers

Now Preskill, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is scratching his head over the latest one to surface. Nicknamed the black hole firewall paradox, it comes about when you consider what happens to someone falling into a black hole.

With the nearest black hole more than 1000 light years away, the question is very much a theoretical one. Yet just by studying such a possibility, physicists are hoping to make a breakthrough in their efforts to combine general relativity and quantum mechanics into a theory of quantum gravity – one of the most intractable problems in physics today.

Black holes have long been fertile breeding grounds for paradoxes. Back in 1974, Stephen Hawking, along with Jacob Bekenstein of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, famously showed that black holes are not entirely black. Instead, they radiate energy known as Hawking radiation comprising photons and other quantum particles – an agonisingly slow process that eventually causes the black hole to evaporate completely.

Hawking spotted a problem with this picture. The radiation seemed so random that he surmised it couldn’t carry any information about the stuff that had fallen in. So as the black hole evaporates, the information it holds must eventually disappear. Yet this is in direct conflict with a central tenet of quantum physics, which says that information cannot be destroyed. The black hole information paradox was born.

Over the decades, physicists have struggled with this paradox. Hawking thought that black holes destroyed information and the answer was to question quantum mechanics. Others disagreed. After all, Hawking’s idea came from his efforts to meld general relativity and quantum mechanics – a mathematical feat so elusive that he was forced to make approximations. Preskill even made a bet with Hawking that black holes don’t destroy information.

Several arguments suggest that Hawking was wrong. One of the most compelling comes from thinking about what happens as the evaporating black hole gets smaller and smaller. If information can’t escape or be destroyed, then more and more has to be stored in an ever-shrinking volume. But if this is the case, quantum theory says the probability for making a tiny black hole increases from virtually nothing to almost infinity wherever matter collides against matter. “You should have seen it at the Large Hadron Collider, you should have seen it at Fermilab, you should have seen it in tiny room-sized particle accelerators from the 1930s,” says Don Marolf, a theorist at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB). “You should see it when you go and jump up and down on the grass.”

Obviously that hasn’t happened. The other possibility – that matter and the information it carries can leak out from a black hole – is unlikely. Any material that falls in would need to travel faster than light to escape the black hole’s fearsome gravity.

Perhaps, instead, the answer lies with the Hawking radiation itself. Maybe it isn’t so featureless. “A common reaction was that Hawking had simply been careless,” says Joseph Polchinski, also at UCSB. “It wasn’t that information was lost, it was that he hadn’t kept track of it enough.”

Yet all early efforts to do away with the paradox proved unsuccessful. “Hawking had identified a really deep problem,” says Polchinski.

As it happened, Hawking changed his mind in 2004, partly due to work by an Argentinian physicist called Juan Maldacena (see “Hawking’s change of heart”). Black holes don’t destroy information after all, he conceded. He honoured the bet he made with Preskill and presented him with an encyclopaedia of baseball, which Preskill likened to a black hole, because it was heavy and it took effort to get information out of it.

Into The Abyss..

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International Efforts Accurately Measure Black Hole’s Spin for First Time: It’s Near The Speed of Light

Astronomers have recently been able to finely measure the spin of a supermassive Black hole and as expected, it’s really really fast, near light speed fast:

The black hole in question resides 60 million light years away at the centre of the NGC 1365 spiral galaxy, is a mind-boggling 3.2 million kilometres in diameter, has a mass two million times that of our Sun and is spinning at a rather impressive 1.08 billion km/h. Astronomers can now say this with confidence, after combining the efforts of Nasa’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (Nustar) — which measures high-energy X-rays — and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, which measures low-energy X-rays.

The former was launched in June 2012 to track and measure the highest energy events in space. However, without the aid of ESA’s device, it was unable to determine whether the measurements of warped X-rays being taken were a result of nearby gas clouds manipulating results, or the black hole’s own gravitational pull.

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The find is an important one, because it helps astronomers understand the life of a black hole — which stretches, pulls on and distorts space, and can affect the evolution of galaxies — which in turn helps test the accuracy of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which argues that gravity can bend space and time.

“The black hole’s spin is a memory, a record, of the past history of the galaxy as a whole,” Guido Risaliti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, the lead author of a paper revealing the results, said in a statement.

Journal Reference: Nature

For more on Black Holes and Astrophysics.

Galactic Gas Cloud Could Help Spot Hidden Black Holes

The heart of our Milky Way galaxy is an exotic place. It’s swarming with gigantic stars, showered by lethal blasts of high-energy radiation and a veritable cul-de-sac for the most enigmatic stellar corpses known to science: black holes. And at the center of the whole mélange is the granddaddy of all the black holes in the galaxy — Sagittarius A, a supermassive monster with 4 million times more mass than the Sun packed into an area smaller than the orbit of Mercury.

Sgr A* dominates the core of the Milky Way with its powerful gravity, trapping giant stars into breakneck orbits and actively feeding on anything that comes close enough. Recently astronomers have been watching the movement of a large cloud of gas that’s caught in the pull of Sgr A* — they’re eager to see what exactly will happen once the cloud (designated G2) enters the black hole’s dining room… it will, in essence, be the first time anyone watches a black hole eat.

But before the dinner bell rings — estimated to be sometime this September — the cloud still has to cover a lot of space. Some scientists are now suggesting that G2′s trip through the crowded galactic nucleus could highlight the locations of other smaller black holes in the area, revealing their hiding places as it passes.

In a new paper titled “G2 can Illuminate the Black Hole Population near the Galactic Center” researchers from Columbia University in New York City and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts propose that G2, a cloud of cool ionized gas over three times more massive than Earth, will likely encounter both neutron stars and other black holes on its way around (and/or into) SMBH Sgr A*.

The team notes that there are estimated to be around 20,000 stellar-mass black holes and about as many neutron stars in the central parsec of the galaxy. (A parsec is equal to 3.26 light-years, or 30.9 trillion km. In astronomical scale it’s just over 3/4 the way to the nearest star from the Sun.) In addition there may also be an unknown number of intermediate-mass black holes lurking within the same area.

Continue..

Monster Black Holes Grow Surprisingly Fast

Giant black holes are famous for their appetites, but these matter-munching monsters are even greedier than scientists once thought, a new study suggests.

Image: This image depicts three hot blobs of matter orbiting a black hole. If placed in our Solar System, this black hole would appear like a dark abyss spread out nearly as wide as Mercury’s orbit. And the three blobs (each as large as the Sun) would be as far out as Jupiter. They orbit the black hole in a lightning-quick 20,000 miles per second, over a tenth of the speed of light. Credit: NASA/Dana Berry, SkyWorks Digital

The supermassive black holes that lurk at the center of most (if not all) galaxies are growing surprisingly quickly, the study found. The result implies that these cosmic behemoths are sustained primarily by frequent small meals rather than rare and dramatic galactic mergers, as was previously believed.

Supermassive black holes are almost incomprehensibly huge, with some containing 10 billion or more times the mass of our own sun. The research team used computer simulations to investigate how such black holes grow, especially in spiral galaxies like the Earth’s Milky Way.

Black Holes Spew Out Surprise

Black holes come in a variety of sizes, ranging from 10 times the mass of the sun to a billion times as massive. But new research shows that black holes of completely different masses, ages and locations can produce jets of ionized gas that behave similarly.

Image: This illustration shows a black hole emitting jets of fast-moving plasma above and below it, as matter swirls around in an orbiting disk. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

“As scientists, we are always seeking universal principles,” Rodrigo Nemmen, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told SPACE.com.

Nemmen and his colleagues studied a wide variety of black holes in an attempt to compare how efficiently their jets emitted light. “I was very surprised,” Nemmen said of the results.

Discovering similarities between ancient supermassive black holes in the center of distant galaxies and baby black holes born as stars collapse should help scientists gain a firmer understanding of these jets.

Cosmic accelerators

Black holes are well known for their ability to pull matter into them. But not all material near a black hole finds itself lost. Some bits of matter just outside the point of no return (called the event horizon) are accelerated away at near-light speeds, creating jets of particles shooting out above and below the black holes.

“I like to call black holes ‘cosmic LHCs,’ or very powerful particle accelerators,” Nemmen said, referring to the Large Hadron Collider, an underground machine in Switzerland that speeds protons to 99.9999991 percent the speed of light.

When matter is spun away from a black hole in the form of a jet, most of its energy goes into its motion, but some of it is changed into light in the form of gamma-rays. Nemmen and his team studied findings on 293 previously observed black holes and calculated how efficiently the jets converted energy to light. They found that the rate scaled across the range of black holes.

“This was one of the surprises of this work, that this efficiency of conversion of the energy into light is essentially the same for black holes with very different masses, very different ages and completely different environments,” Nemmen said.

Black holes are powerful beasts, interesting in and of themselves. But by accelerating ionized gas, they also have the potential to change their environment. Heating up space, they could affect the production of new stars, thereby influencing the galaxy they live in.

“These jets might be powerful agents of creating changes in the host galaxy,” Nemmen said.

Scientists still don’t have a strong understanding of how these violent particle outflows form. But the fact that the energy efficiency of the jets scales across black holes may help theorists better understand how something that pulls in most particles could shoot away others, and how the outflow of energy may affect surrounding space.

The findings were published online today (Dec. 13) in the journal Science.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say that if black holes did not exist, we wouldn’t be here.” — Phil Plait

inothernews:

Jets powered by the gravitational energy of a super massive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A are seen in this composite image from the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and the recently upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico. Hercules A is some two billion light-years away and is roughly 1,000 times more massive than the Milky Way; the black hole at its center is 2.5 billion times the mass of our Sun. (Photo: NASA / ESA via Rex Features/ The Telegraph)

Whoa.

Monster Black Hole Is Biggest Ever Found

Astronomers have discovered what may be the most massive black hole ever known in a small galaxy about 250 million light-years from Earth, scientists say.

Image: This image shows the disk galaxy NGC 1277, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. The small, flattened galaxy has one of the biggest central super-massive black holes ever found in its center, the equivalent of 17 billion suns.<.em> Credit: NASA / ESA / Andrew C. Fabian / Remco C. E. van den Bosch (MPIA)

The supermassive black hole has a mass equivalent to 17 billion suns and is located inside the galaxy NGC 1277 in the constellation Perseus. It makes up about 14 percent of its host galaxy’s mass, compared with the 0.1 percent a normal black hole would represent, scientists said.

“This is a really oddball galaxy,” said study team member Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas at Austin in a statement. “It’s almost all black hole. This could be the first object in a new class of galaxy-black hole systems.”

The giant black hole is about 11 times as wide as the orbit of Neptune around our sun, researchers said. The mass is so far above normal that the scientists took a year to double-check and submit their research paper for publication, according to the study’s lead author, Remco van den Bosch.

“The first time I calculated it, I thought I must have done something wrong. We tried it again with the same instrument, then a different instrument,” van den Bosch, an astronomer at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, told SPACE.com. “Then I thought, ‘Maybe something else is happening.’”

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Biggest Black Hole Blast Ever Could Solve Cosmological Mystery

Astronomers have seen a distant galaxy that blasts away material with two trillion times the energy the sun emits — the biggest such eruption ever seen. That ejection of matter could answer an important question about the universe: why are the black holes in the centers of galaxies so light?

Image: Artist’s impression of the huge outflow ejected from the quasar SDSS J1106+1939 Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

Computer models of the early universe usually produce a virtual cosmos that looks like ours except for one thing. The ratio of the mass of black holes in galaxy centers to the rest of the matter in galaxies is larger in the simulations than in the real universe.

Scientists think somehow galaxies are ridding themselves of much of the mass that would have ended up falling into their central black holes. However, until now researchers have been at a lack for an explanation of how this might happen.

To expel matter from galaxies takes energy. “We needed some input of energy from supermassive black holes,” Nahum Arav, an astrophysicist at Virginia Tech.

Supermassive black holes are obvious candidates, because they are the most energetic objects known. Some galaxies containing active black holes, called quasars, shine more brightly than anything else in the universe. “Our simulations showed that if we allowed the quasar to release a lot of mechanical energy, then the masses of galaxies would match observations,” Arav said.

Arav led a team that observed a quasar, called SDSS J1106+1939, which dates back to when the universe was only 3 billion years old (it is now about 13.7 billion years of age). Most quasars are millions or even billions of light-years distant, which means we see them as they were long ago. As such, they offer a unique window back in time, to when galaxies were young.

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bring dat mass to daddy

Black Holes’ Tempests Twist Their Tails

A black hole spins. But when its axis of rotation is offset from the surrounding mass of gas and plasma, a black hole’s energetic jets may wobble and tumble in a perfect test of Einstein’s theories as they spray millions of miles across Space.

0:36 — Ho—ly space time destruction! that is literally space and time being treated like a piece of cheap cloth..

Distant Black Holes Map Universe’s Dark Energy History

Extremely bright black holes gobbling up matter in the distant universe have provided a window back in time for astronomers to study dark energy more than 10 billion years ago.

Image: Light from distant quasars (red dots at left) is partially absorbed as it passes through clouds of hydrogen gas. Astronomers working on the BOSS survey used this effect to study the history of dark energy in the universe’s ancient past. Credit: Zosia Rostomian, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Nic Ross, BOSS Lyman-alpha team, Berkeley Lab; and Springel et al, Virgo Consortium and Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

Dark energy is the mysterious force thought to be pulling everything in the universe apart, causing space-time to expand and galaxies to move farther and farther away from each other, all at an accelerating clip.

Dark energy, whatever it is, currently appears to be beating out the attractive of force of gravity that works to pull galaxies and everything in the universe closer together. However, that wasn’t always the case. When the universe was young, astronomers think dark energy’s impact was small, and gravity won out.

To confirm this idea and learn about when gravity lost the fight to dark energy, astronomers must look back in time. They do that by studying extremely far objects whose light has taken billions of years to reach us on Earth, thus presenting a picture of them as they were long ago.

Now, researchers report observations of the early universe from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which studied thousands of distant objects called quasars to map out the universe up to 11.5 billion years ago. Quasars are active black holes that release copious amounts of light as they gorge on matter.

“No technique for dark energy research has been able to probe this ancient era before, a time when matter was still dense enough for gravity to slow the expansion of the universe, and the influence of dark energy hadn’t yet been felt,” BOSS principal investigator David Schlegel, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in a statement. “In our own time, expansion is accelerating because the universe is dominated by dark energy. How dark energy effected the transition from deceleration to acceleration is one of the most challenging questions in cosmology.”

“We are seeing back to the matter-dominated universe, when expansion was decelerating and dark energy was hard to see,” said Berkeley astrophysicist Martin White. “The transition from decelerating expansion to accelerating expansion was a sharp one, and now we live in a universe dominated by dark energy. The biggest puzzle in cosmology is, why now?”