All posts tagged: supermassive black hole

Wandering black hole found 30,000 light-years from its galaxy’s center

Wandering black hole found 30,000 light-years from its galaxy’s center

Published by Jenni Sidey

Astronomers spotted a black hole feeding on a star far from the center of its galaxy, something scientists had rarely seen before. They found it using an AI tool that scans the whole sky for the telltale flash of a black hole tearing a star apart, instead of only checking galaxy centers. The black hole weighs about a million times as much as our sun and may have been flung out of its galaxy’s center or left behind after a smaller galaxy was swallowed by a bigger one. A flash of light near the edge of a massive galaxy, far from its glowing center, turned out to be a black hole tearing a star apart. Astronomers had assumed the biggest black holes always sit at a galaxy’s heart. This one didn’t. The discovery marks the first time scientists have caught a dormant black hole so far out on a galaxy’s outskirts. The black hole itself gives off no light. It only became visible for a moment, when it shredded a passing star in an event …

MIT astronomers detect oldest known flickering quasar from the cosmic dawn

MIT astronomers detect oldest known flickering quasar from the cosmic dawn

Published by Jenni Sidey

A quasar from the universe’s first 850 million years has started to look less like a distant pinprick and more like a real physical system. By catching it flickering over time, astronomers have traced the structure of matter swirling around one of the earliest known supermassive black holes. What they found deepens one of cosmology’s biggest puzzles. The object, known as J0439+1634, sits at a redshift of 6.51. This means its light comes from a time just 850 million years after the Big Bang. Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe, powered by supermassive black holes pulling in gas and dust. As that material spirals inward, it heats up and radiates enormous amounts of energy. Sometimes, it outshines the galaxy around it. Many quasars have already been found from this early era, often called the cosmic dawn. What makes this one stand out is not just its age, but its variability. Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a quasar flickering from the very early universe. This artist’s concept illustrates a quasar accretion …

Deep-space water reservoir contains trillions of times more water than all Earth’s oceans combined

Deep-space water reservoir contains trillions of times more water than all Earth’s oceans combined

Published by Jenni Sidey

A cloud of water larger than anything ever seen in space has turned up around one of the brightest objects in the early universe. The reservoir surrounds the quasar APM 08279+5255, a blazing source powered by a supermassive black hole more than 12 billion light-years from Earth. The scale is hard to grasp. Astronomers estimated that the water there equals about 140 trillion times the volume of Earth’s oceans. It is also the most distant water reservoir ever detected, placing it in a period when the universe was far younger than it is today. That alone made the finding unusual. What made it more revealing was the setting. The water is not sitting quietly in a cold cloud. It exists in a harsh, energized region around a black hole with a mass about 20 billion times that of the sun. The quasar’s total energy output matches roughly a thousand trillion suns, flooding nearby gas with radiation. “The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt …

Massive binary star system may be feeding the Milky Way’s central black hole

Massive binary star system may be feeding the Milky Way’s central black hole

Published by Jenni Sidey

A string of small gas clouds near the Milky Way’s central black hole has puzzled astronomers for years. Now, new observations suggest those clouds are not random scraps drifting through space. They appear to be part of a larger flow of material, and a massive binary star may be creating them. At the center of the galaxy sits Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*, a supermassive black hole surrounded by stars, gas, and dust moving through an extreme gravitational environment. Astronomers have long treated this region as a natural test site for watching how matter behaves near a black hole. One of the lingering mysteries has been a set of compact gas clumps found close to Sgr A* in infrared observations. The first of those objects, called G2, was identified in 2012. It looked like a dusty, ionized gas cloud with hydrogen and helium emission, a temperature of about 600 kelvin, and a mass estimated at no more than about 3 Earth masses. It was also stretched out by gravity as it moved along a highly …