New Black Hole Discovered Towards Milky Way Galaxy's Center By NASA

A new black hole was just discovered located towards the center of the Milky Way. An enormous amount of high-energy X-rays, quickly rising, was detected by NASA’s Swift satellite, making its presence known.
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“Bright X-ray novae are so rare that they’re essentially once-a-mission events and this is the first one Swift has seen,” said Neil Gehrels, the mission’s principal investigator, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “This is really something we’ve been waiting for.”

X-ray nova’s are X-ray source’s that don’t stick around; they appear out of nowhere, reach their peak of emissions in only a few days, and then completely disappear during the next few months. They generally occur after a large amount of gas gets quickly drawn into an extremely dense object, neutron stars or a black holes.

The x-ray source that Swift observed happened twice on September 16th, and then once the next day.

“Named Swift J1745-26 after the coordinates of its sky position, the nova is located a few degrees from the center of our galaxy toward the constellation Sagittarius. While astronomers do not know its precise distance, they think the object resides about 20,000 to 30,000 light-years away in the galaxy’s inner region.”

So far, ground-based astronomers have only observed radio and infrared emissions, there are very thick clouds of dust that have stopped any visible light from shining through.

“The nova peaked in hard X-rays — energies above 10,000 electron volts, or several thousand times that of visible light — on Sept. 18, when it reached an intensity equivalent to that of the famous Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant that serves as a calibration target for high-energy observatories and is considered one of the brightest sources beyond the solar system at these energies.”

“Even as it dimmed at higher energies, the nova brightened in the lower-energy, or softer, emissions detected by Swift’s X-ray Telescope, a behavior typical of X-ray novae. By Wednesday, Swift J1745-26 was 30 times brighter in soft X-rays than when it was discovered and it continued to brighten.”

“The pattern we’re seeing is observed in X-ray novae where the central object is a black hole. Once the X-rays fade away, we hope to measure its mass and confirm its black hole status,” said Boris Sbarufatti, an astrophysicist at Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy, who currently is working with other Swift team members at Penn State in University Park, Pa.

This black hole is likely in a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) system, one which would include a star like our sun. “A stream of gas flows from the normal star and enters into a storage disk around the black hole. In most LMXBs, the gas in the disk spirals inward, heats up as it heads toward the black hole, and produces a steady stream of X-rays.”

“But under certain conditions, stable flow within the disk depends on the rate of matter flowing into it from the companion star. At certain rates, the disk fails to maintain a steady internal flow and instead flips between two dramatically different conditions — a cooler, less ionized state where gas simply collects in the outer portion of the disk like water behind a dam, and a hotter, more ionized state that sends a tidal wave of gas surging toward the center.”

“Each outburst clears out the inner disk, and with little or no matter falling toward the black hole, the system ceases to be a bright source of X-rays,” said John Cannizzo, a Goddard astrophysicist. “Decades later, after enough gas has accumulated in the outer disk, it switches again to its hot state and sends a deluge of gas toward the black hole, resulting in a new X-ray outburst.”

This name astronomers have given this phenomenon is ‘the thermal-viscous limit cycle,’ the idea is one of the few that could “explain transient outbursts across a wide range of systems, from protoplanetary disks around young stars, to dwarf novae — where the central object is a white dwarf star — and even bright emission from supermassive black holes in the hearts of distant galaxies.”

Source: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

Image Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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