A cosmic gas cloud has a mysterious gamma-ray “heartbeat” that appears in sync with a neighboring black hole.
Using data from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an international team of researchers found the ‘heartbeat’ in a cosmic gas cloud in the constellation Aquila, the eagle. The cloud “beats” in rhythm with a miniature black hole about 100 light-years away, suggesting that the objects are connected in some way, according to a statement from the DESY National Research Center in Germany.
The black hole is part of a microquasar system known as SS 433, which includes a giant star that is about 30 times the mass of the sun. A microquasar is simply a small quasar, the brightest type of object in the universe, which consists of a large black hole that emits extraordinary amounts of light as it flies up its stellar neighbors. As the two objects in SS 433 revolve around each other, the black hole pulls matter out of the giant star, creating an action disk around the black hole.
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“This material collects in an accretion disk before it falls into the black hole, like water shrinking above the drainage of a bathtub,” said Jian Li, lead author of the study by the National Research Center DESY, in the statement. “However, part of that case does not fall under the turn, but shoots out at high speed into two narrow jets in opposite directions above and below the rotating action disk.”
The jets consist of high particles and ultra-strong magnetic fields that produce X-rays and gamma rays, which are detected by the Fermi space telescope. However, the action disk oscillates, like predecessors, which means that the two jets shoot out into space along a spiral path, instead of a straight line, according to the statement.
The microquasar SS 433 swings with a period of 162 days. At the same time, the researchers found the same pattern of behavior in the gamma ray signal generated from the inconspicuous gas cloud, which they named Fermi J1913 + 0515. Their findings, published August 17 in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest the emission of the gas cloud, as “heartbeat”, is driven by the microquasar.
However, the two objects are relatively far apart, at a distance of about 100 light-years. Therefore, further observations are needed to fully understand how the black hole powers the heartbeat in the gas cloud.
“Finding such an untimely connection via timing, about 100 light-years away from the microquasar, not even along the direction of the jets is as unexpected as it is amazing,” Li said in the statement. “But how the black hole can support the heartbeat of the gas cloud is unclear to us.”
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