“But at the same time, it can be responsible for how some stars form, showing that black holes can be creative, not just destructive”, said team member Dr Marie Machacek, also of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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Eric Schlegel, leader of the “burping” black hole study conducted at San Antonio’s University of Texas described the event as “The best example of snowplough material I’ve ever seen”. It’s thought that all spiral galaxies have black holes at their center, which range in size from 1 million to 1 billion times the mass of our sun depending on the size of the galaxy itself.
We at Speaking of Science love a good black hole burp.
The cosmic burp occurred in the supermassive black hole found in the tiny galaxy known as NGC 5159. “This black hole is blasting hot gas and particles into its surroundings that must play an important role in the evolution of the galaxy”.
The black hole studied in November was 300 million light years away, but the super-massive black hole observed by Schlegel and his colleagues is just 26 million light years away in the Messier 51 galaxy system. She discovered this latest two-black hole galaxy – her fourth – a year ago. The study team called it a clear case of a supermassive black hole affecting its host galaxy in a way astronomers call “feedback”. This galaxy is the companion to the handsome Whirlpool galaxy, and these “belches” from the black hole may be caused by an interaction between the two galaxies.
One possibility, said Comerford, is that extreme gravitational and tidal forces simply stripped away most of the stars from one of the black holes over the course of the galactic merger. Researchers have been trying to come up with an explanation for the naked black hole, found in the galaxy SDSS J1126+2944.
This suggests that the hotter, X-ray emitting gas has ‘snow-plowed, ‘ or swept up, the hydrogen gas from NGC 5195’s center.
Astronomers have noticed two enormous waves of gas being “belched” by the black hole in the middle of a nearby galaxy.
Most people were too busy with the goings-on at CES this week to know of another large gathering, this one in the astronomic field, taking place at the same time. Scientists think that as gas funnels in toward the center of the black hole, it generates enough energy to shoot some back out into space. The first x-ray arc is estimated to be between one and three million-years-old, and the second is estimated to be between three and six million years old.
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The researchers also noted that burping out the gases is an essential characteristic of black holes because it helps in preventing them from growing bigger.
