Astronomers have witnessed the existence of massive black holes that shoot powerful beams of particles into space and then switch targets and fire at new celestial targets.
This cosmic firing range, reminiscent of the destruction of the planet Alderaan by the Death Star in Star Wars, could help scientists determine the effects of black holes on surrounding galaxies and beyond.
The team behind the observations examined 16 exploding supermassive black holes using NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), a system of ten remotely operated robotic radio telescopes from Socorro, New Mexico. Doing this allowed scientists to discover that supermassive black hole jets can change direction by almost 90 degrees.
“We found that about a third of the rays now point in completely different directions than before,” team leader Francesco Ubertosi from the University of Bologna said in a statement. said. “These Death Star black holes spin around and point to new targets, like the fictional space station in Star Wars.”
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The team tracked the direction in which supermassive black holes target jets of high-energy particles that explode at speeds approaching the speed of light as they reach distances of many light-years from their source. They also used X-ray data from Chandra to examine two gaps, or “bubbles,” in interstellar gas that indicate the direction from which the jets fired millions of years ago. Comparing the two data sets allowed them to detect how supermassive black holes redirect their jets.
This reorientation occurs over time intervals ranging from a million years to several tens of millions of years. This may sound incredibly slow, but it’s relatively short considering how long these cosmic giants have been around.
“Given that these black holes are probably more than 10 billion years old, we think a major direction change would be rapid within a few million years,” said team member and Center for Astrophysics Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) scientist Gerrit Schellenberger. said. “Changing the direction of giant black hole beams in about a million years is like changing the direction of a new battleship in a few minutes.”
The jets that the team behind this research focused on are created when supermassive black holes are surrounded by flattened clouds of matter called accretion disks. These layers of gas and dust slowly feed matter into the black hole, but not all matter within them shares this fate.
Strong magnetic fields around supermassive black holes direct charged particles towards the poles of the black holes, accelerating them to speeds that are a significant fraction of the speed of light. These particles are ejected from each of the poles in twin jets in opposite directions.
When the jets hit the hot gas in the surrounding galaxy, they emit energy that prevents this gas from cooling. Because stars form when galactic gas cools and forms extremely dense clusters that collapse under their own gravity, this process can disrupt star formation in areas of galaxies. If these rays travel between galaxies as they change direction, they increase the number of regions where star formation can be inhibited.
“These galaxies are too distant to tell whether the beams from Death Star black holes harm stars and planets, but we are confident that they prevent many stars and planets from forming in the first place,” team member and CfA researcher Ewan O said. ‘ said Sullivan.
The researchers also considered the possibility that supermassive black hole jets might not line up with cavities; because gas is agitated in galactic clusters almost like wine in a glass rotating in a circle. This churning of gas may have resulted from the collision of two galaxies in the cluster.
But the team rejected this idea because this slush is seen in clusters where supermassive black hole jets are misaligned with voids, as well as in clusters where there is an alignment between the beam orientation and these large gas bubbles.
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One of the questions the team cannot answer is how these supermassive black holes can redirect their jets. Supermassive black holes are spinning, and their rays must be aligned with their spin axes, which is the imaginary line that should also connect the black hole’s poles.
As we mentioned above, the material that feeds the black hole also provides material to the jets. One possibility is that as the accretion disk rotates around the black hole, matter falling from different angles that are not parallel to the disk can shift the black hole’s spin axis.
“It is possible that material falling rapidly into black holes at a different angle and for long enough could drag the spin axes in a different direction, causing the beams to point in a different direction,” said team member and CfA scientist Jan Vrtilek.
The team’s research was published in The Astrophysical Journal.