We all have bad days, with a monumental striptease here or an expression of anger there, but have you ever thrown a tantrum so bad that it upsets the balance of the entire galaxy?
Well, thanks to you, it turned out like this One particularly badly behaved black hole Observed by XMM-Newton Space Observatory.
If you zoom in on any large galaxy, you’ll find a supermassive black hole that pulls in gas from its surroundings with its immense gravity. As the gas spirals inward, it is squeezed into what is known as an accretion disk, a flat disk of gas orbiting around a massive central object.
Over time, the gas closest to the black hole passes through the point of no return and is essentially chewed up by its immense gravity. However, there’s a twist here. The black hole consumes only a portion of this gas and spits the rest back into space.
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Sometimes, like the naughty black hole discovered by XMM Newton, a black hole doesn’t just spew out a small amount of gas, it spews out its entire meal over hundreds of days. The gas in the accretion disk is thrown off in all directions at such high velocities that it completely wipes out the surrounding interstellar gas.
The effect would be so severe that gas would be blown through space and new stars would no longer be able to form. This completely changes the landscape of the surrounding galaxy where the black hole is found.
Typically, only black holes with very bright accretion disks spew out gas. These brighter disks typically feature faster “black hole winds” that spew out gas.
“It is extremely rare to observe ultrafast winds, and even rarer to detect winds with enough energy to change the properties of the host galaxy,” the co-authors said. Elias CammonAstronomer at Roma Tre University in Italy.
“The fact that Markarian 817 is [the galaxy in question] These winds occurred for about a year but were not particularly active, suggesting that the black hole may be changing the shape of its host galaxy much more than previously thought. ing. ”
For scientists, this research improves our understanding of how black holes and the galaxies around them interact. Many galaxies appear to have large regions around their centers where few new stars form. This may be explained by the black hole’s wind sweeping away star-forming gas.
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Source: www.sciencefocus.com
