An international team of astronomers has discovered a completely new way to study the behavior of active black holes.
They looked at samples of active black holes located at the centers of 136 galaxies and found that they emitted microwaves and X-rays in consistent patterns, regardless of their rate of consumption of surrounding galactic material such as gas, dust, and plasma clouds.
Led by scientists from Cardiff University, the team says this process is not what we currently understand how black holes eat.
It is currently thought that active black holes are different in nature, depending on their appetites, characterized by the layout of their cores and the way they attract galactic matter.
However, the team found that these black holes may have more similarities than previously thought. theirsFindings:Published in the Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, it can provide new information about how galaxies evolve.
Lead investigator Dr Ilaria Ruffa, a postdoctoral researcher at Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, shared: "The microwave and X-ray glows we detect from the region around the black hole appear to be closely tied to their mass, and these brilliance arise from the plasma flow that falls into it in disorder. This phenomenon exists in two different galaxies, one with a huge devouring power, which can completely engulf a star-like like Sun almost every year, while the other is relatively mild, reaching the same amount of engulfment in 10 million years.
This alarmed us, because we thought that such a flow should only occur in low-consumption systems**, whereas in galaxies with a large appetite, black holes should obtain energy through a more orderly and constant flow of matter, commonly known as 'accretion disks'.
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The team made this momentous discovery when they delved deeper into the relationship between the cold gas around an active black hole and how it fuels WISDOM samples from 35 nearby galaxies. Dr. Ruffa added, "Our study shows that the microwave light we detected may originate from plasma streams in various active black holes. This discovery completely upends our understanding of how these systems consume matter and grow into the behemoths of the universe today. The correlations observed by the team also provide a new way to estimate the mass of black holes, which astronomers believe is critical to understanding their impact on the evolution of galaxies across the universe.
Co-author Dr Timothy D**is, a reader in Cardiff University's School of Physics and Astronomy, added: "Galaxies are very concerned about the black holes that exist within their cores. They probably shouldn't do that, because while we always think of black holes as these supermassive beasts that devour everything around them, they are really very small and light in the context of the entire galaxy.
However, they have a mysterious non-gravitational effect on matter tens of thousands of light-years away from them. This is something we've been baffling for years as astronomers.
Measuring the mass of the black hole, and how that mass compares to the properties of the host galaxy, is the best way to begin to understand why this mystery persists. Our new approach opens a new window into this problem, and the next generation of instruments will allow us to explore it in depth in cosmic time.
References: Ilaria Ruffa, Timothy A D**is, Jacob S Elford, Martin Bureau, Michele Cappellari, Jindra Gensior, Daryl Haggard, Satoru Iguchi, Federico Lelli, Fu-Heng Liang, Lijie Liu, Marc Sarzi, Thomas G Williams and Hengyue Zhangy, 5 December 2023, Monthly Bulletin of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
doi： 10.1093/mnrasl/slad167
The team consists of:Composed of researchers from the Cardiff Centre for Astrophysical Research and Technology (CHART) and international partners from Europe, Canada and Japan, they plan to further test their findings, as:Part of the new "Multi-wavelength Observation of the Launch Area of Nuclear Dark Objects" (WONDER) project, led by Dr. Ruffa.