Impressions are gained in a fluid, global, diffused way. Light (purple) takes a turn around an object in space, like a black hole, divided in different ways – one comes faster than the other.
Carl Knox, Ozgrav
Scanning through a catalog of more than 2,700 getaway deep space explosions captured by NASA’s Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, James Painter’s task was to find a needle in a needle stack. Dr. Mel, a student at the University of Melbourne, wanted to find one of the explosions, the gamma-ray explosion, which was “given a lens” – its path was interrupted by a massive cosmic object on its way to Earth.
By the end of his master’s, he had slammed the candidates into just a handful, and after creating some obscure analysis techniques, he was left with only one.
The candidate, known as GRB 950830, is detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday, and the massive global object that has to snake around it to travel to Earth is the “intermediate-mass black hole.” A rare species of global gravity has sunk that astronomers are just beginning to understand.
Goldilocks x
In space, there are two well-known types of black holes: black holes of stars, when a massive star explodes and then breaks itself, and a supermassive black hole, which sits in the center of the galaxy. This The supermassive black hole in the heart of the Messier 87 galaxy Was The very first black hole image subject, Snapped in 2019.
The black holes in the stars are only about 10 times the mass of the sun. Supermassive black holes can be billions of times larger. The region between them? “We see nothing between these two limits,” says Panetter.
Astrophysicists do theories – and have begun to discover – in these so-called “mass gaps”, “goldilocks” zones where intermediate-mass black holes, or IMBHs, are thought to exist. These black holes are 100 to 100,000 times the size of the Sun’s mass and are the lost link between the tiny black holes that are the supermassive ones at the center of the wreckage and galaxies of the universe.
Very few intermediate-mass black holes have certainly been found. Second, a tiny black hole was discovered in September 2020: Astronomers studying gravitational waves announced They found an IMBH with a mass about 150 times larger than the Sun., Created by the merger of two small black holes.
But one discovered by Panetter and co-authors Rachel Webster, an astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne and an astrophysicist at Monash University, Eric Thrain, is monstrous in comparison.
“Our IMBH is too big,” says Painter. “If it formed from a stellar black hole, many observations have been made through mergers to reach its observational mass.”
The same candidate, weighing about 50,000 suns, 3 XMM which 215022.4−055108, was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters in March 2020, but was found when a nearby wire was torn. The method used by Painter and colleagues takes advantage of gravity lensing.
Gravity lens
The GRB 950830 is a short gamma-ray that is flooded from a very long distance. Researchers aren’t sure where it came from, but it’s somewhere deep in the black forest of the universe. They suspect that the explosion was formed when two neutron stars collided with each other, releasing huge amounts of energy.
Paneter was searching for a “gravitational lens” gamma-ray explosion from a BATSE instrument at NASA’s Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, which took about 2,700 gamma-ray pings between 1990 and 1999. “We want the best chance of finding a lens,” says Painter.
The GRB 950830 was the only team to receive the lens.
“My original stimulus was the first GRB given a lens on gravity, despite 30 years of research no statistically strong candidate was found,” Panetter notes. “We have developed a state-of-the-art analytics software that greatly improves previous lens detection methods, allowing us to reject candidates as well.”
After a few more analyzes, a more exciting search material was found. Ener exploded Back An intermediate mass black hole.
IMBH’s incredible gravity bridge bends all kinds of light and electromagnetic radiation around it. When the gamma-ray exploded, it traveled across the universe towards us. But when it came to IMBH, the signal split, an event known as gravity lensing.
There is a so-called signal in the lensing, which is the echo of the signal, as some of the gamma-ray explosions taking a turn around the IMBH take longer to reach the detector at the radiation observatory. That’s the very gut tle difference. “Despite traveling billions of light-years to reach us, this difference in arrival time is only 400 mm for our case,” Paneter explains.
It’s not an IMBH specific investigation, but it’s another good candidate. It also helps astronomers estimate how many of these IMBHs can be hidden in deep space. Their calculations suggest there may be as many as 46,000 around them in the Milky Way galaxy, but Painter says there is a lot of uncertainty in this measurement. Finding more lensing candidates will help reduce uncertainty.
“Ideally, we’ll be analyzing other catalogs in the future,” says Painter.
Perhaps, Thren suggests, IMBH may have been ancient relics of the early universe from the time before the formation of stars and galaxies. If this is the case, they could be “the seeds of a supermassive black hole that lives in the heart of the galaxies today.”
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