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Using data from NASA’s Swift Observatory, astronomers have detected an unusually repetitive signal coming from two massive black holes in a galaxy a billion light years away. The
Using data from NASA’s Swift Observatory, astronomers have detected an unusually repetitive signal coming from two massive black holes in a galaxy a billion light years away.
The event, known as AT 2021hdr, shows a pair of orbiting black holes perturbing a cloud of gas, creating periodic fluctuations of light that can be detected at different wavelengths. Located in the constellation Cygnus, this system provides an unprecedented look at how supermassive black holes interact with their environment.
Scientists using NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have detected for the first time signals coming from two massive black holes tearing apart the gas cloud at the center of a distant galaxy.
“This is a very strange event called AT 2021hdr that happens every few months,” explained astrophysicist Lorena Hernández-Garcia of the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics, Transversal Research and Technologies Millennium Core for Supermassive Black Hole Search, and the University. Valparaiso is in Chile. “We think the gas cloud absorbs the black holes. As the black holes orbit each other, they interact with the cloud, disrupting and consuming its gas. This creates an oscillating pattern in the light coming from the system.”
Binary black holes are located at the center of the galaxy 2MASX J21240027+3409114, located 1 billion light-years away in the northern constellation Cygnus. The two are about 16 billion miles (26 billion kilometers) apart, close enough for only a day’s worth of light to pass between them. Together they have a mass of 40 million times the mass of the Sun. Scientists estimate that black holes orbit every 130 days and will collide and merge in about 70,000 years.
AT 2021hdr was first detected in March 2021 by the ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) operated by the California Institute of Technology at Palomar Observatory in California. It has been flagged as a potentially interesting ALeRCE (Automatic Learning for Rapid Event Classification) resource. This multidisciplinary team combines artificial intelligence tools with human expertise to keep the astronomy community informed about events in the night sky, using mountains of data collected by research programs like ZTF.
“Although this flare was initially thought to be a supernova, the 2022 explosions made us think of other explanations,” said co-author Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia, an ALeRCE team member and astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute for Astrophysics and Mathematics Center. Modeling. at the University of Chile. “Each subsequent event helped us refine our model of what was happening in the system.”
Since the first flare, ZTF has been detecting flares from AT 2021hdr every 60-90 days.
Hernandez-Garcia and his team have been observing the source with Swift since November 2022. Swift helped them determine that the binary system produced fluctuations in ultraviolet and X-ray light at the time intervals when the ZTF saw them in the visible range.
The researchers sifted through various Goldilocks-like models to explain what they saw in the data. At first they thought the signal might be a byproduct of normal activity in the galactic center. They then looked to see if this was caused by tidal disruption (the destruction of a star that gets too close to one of the black holes).
They eventually settled on another possibility: tidal disruption of a gas cloud larger than the binary system itself. When the cloud encountered the black holes, gravity broke it apart, forming filaments around the pair, and friction began to heat it. Gas becomes especially dense and hot near black holes. As binary orbitals, a complex interaction of forces expels some of the gas from the system during each rotation. These interactions create the light oscillations observed by Swift and ZTF.
Hernández-Garcia and his team plan to continue observing AT 2021hdr to better understand the system and improve their model. They are also interested in studying its parent galaxy, which is currently merging with another nearby galaxy, an event first reported in their paper.
“As Swift approaches its 20th anniversary, it is incredible to see all the new science the community has helped achieve,” said S. Bradley Cenko, Swift principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It still has much to teach us about our ever-changing universe.” NASA’s missions are part of a growing worldwide network that observes changes in the sky to unravel mysteries of how the universe works.
Source: Port Altele
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