Latest news with #supermassiveblackhole
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Bizarre "Infinity Galaxy" Could Hold the Secrets of Supermassive Black Holes
Astronomers using data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a spectacular cosmic object they're calling the "Infinity Galaxy." The site of an epic head-on collision between two galaxies, it could harbor the secrets to how the heaviest black holes in the universe, the supermassive black holes found at the hearts of galaxies, are born and reach their unbelievable masses — masses extreme enough to organize trillions of stars around them. "Everything is unusual about this galaxy. Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that's pulling a lot of material in," Pieter van Dokkum, lead author of a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement about the work. "As an unexpected bonus, it turns out that both galaxy nuclei also have an active supermassive black hole," van Dokkum added. "So, this system has three confirmed active black holes: two very massive ones in both of the galaxy nuclei, and the one in between them that might have formed there." The singularity-studded object was found by searching through public data collected in the COSMOS-Web survey, which is designed to document the evolution of galaxies, with data gathered on 800,000 realms and counting. In an image taken with the Webb, two bright spots represent the nuclei of each of the two colliding galaxies, both surrounded by their own ring of stars. This lends it the shape of an infinity symbol, hence its memorable name. What's most striking, though, is what appears between them, revealed in follow-up observations: an enormous supermassive black hole swimming in a sea of ionized gas. It's estimated to contain a mass equivalent to a million times that of our own Sun — and it's still actively growing. "It likely didn't just arrive there, but instead it formed there. And pretty recently," van Dokkum said. "We think we're witnessing the birth of a supermassive black hole — something that has never been seen before." This could be some of the most compelling evidence yet of black holes forming by directly collapsing into a singularity from a huge, heavy cloud of gas. The origins of supermassive black holes are one of the great mysteries of cosmology. They undeniably exist, forming the heart of the largest galaxies, including our own Milky Way — but how they form and gain such unbelievable heft is still hotly debated; the heaviest black holes may weigh hundreds of billions of solar masses. The most well-known way that black holes are born is through the collapse of a very massive star that explodes in a supernova. This might spawn a black hole with several to a hundred times the mass of the Sun, maybe even a thousand. Then, give one of these stellar-mass black holes hundreds of millions to billions of years to devour matter that falls into it, or merge with other black holes, and it might reach a supermassive stature. Astronomers, however, have observed black holes boasting millions of solar masses while existing just 400 million years after the Big Bang, which simply isn't enough time for one to reach its size by gradually accreting matter. That points to another possibility called the "heavy seed theory," explains van Dokkum, "where a much larger black hole, maybe up to one million times the mass of our Sun, forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud." This would've been facilitated by the hot conditions of the early universe, allowing a gas cloud to collapse into one large object instead of forming numerous smaller stars. "It's not clear that this direct-collapse process could work in practice," van Dokkum said. But there's compelling reason to believe that the Infinity Galaxy is home to a black hole born through this exact process. The best clue is the central supermassive black hole's velocity, which matches up with the surrounding gas, strongly suggesting it formed right where we're seeing it. If it formed elsewhere in the cosmos and barged into the mix, the velocity would be significantly higher. What astronomers think happened, then, is that when the constituent two galaxies collided, the gas contained in them compressed to form a "dense knot," van Dokkum said, "which then collapsed into a black hole." "We can't say definitively that we have found a direct collapse black hole," van Dokkum concluded. "But we can say that these new data strengthen the case that we're seeing a newborn black hole, while eliminating some of the competing explanations." More on black holes: Scientists Detect Sign of Something Impossible Out in Deep Space Solve the daily Crossword
Gizmodo
11-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
A Rogue Black Hole of Unusual Size Is Devouring Stars in a Distant Galaxy
Astronomers have spotted an apparent supermassive black hole snacking on a star 600 million light-years away, wandering through a galaxy with an even larger black hole at its core. The event, dubbed AT2024tvd, was first spotted by the Palomar Observatory's Zwicky Transient Facility and later confirmed by powerhouse space telescopes including Hubble and Chandra, which helped zero in on the cosmic crime scene. To the researchers' surprise, the responsible black hole was not at the center of its host galaxy, as supermassive black holes tend to be. Rather, this one was 2,600 light-years from the galactic center—a huge distance on paper, but really just one-tenth the distance between our Sun and Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Tidal disruption events (TDEs) like this one occur when a black hole's gravity pulls on a star so violently that the less massive ball of gas is stretched, shredded, and swirled around the black hole, in a process delightfully called spaghettification. The fleeting burst of energy from the event is gargantuan, even rivaling a supernova—the explosive death of a massive star—in brightness. The burst of light is also visible across the electromagnetic spectrum, making TDEs an invaluable resource for spotting black holes that might otherwise be too quiet or hidden to detect, such as the recent rogue object. What makes AT2024tvd special is that it's the first offset TDE discovered by optical surveys, according to a forthcoming paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, which is also posted on the preprint server arXiv. The achievement demonstrates how rogue black holes—warping spacetime and shrouded in darkness as they move through the cosmos—can be spotted, as long as an unfortunate object sacrifices itself for the massive object to reveal itself. 'Tidal disruption events hold great promise for illuminating the presence of massive black holes that we would otherwise not be able to detect,' said study co-author Ryan Chornock, a researcher at the University of California – Berkeley and a member of the ZTF team, in a NASA release. 'Theorists have predicted that a population of massive black holes located away from the centers of galaxies must exist, but now we can use TDEs to find them.' The team has a couple of ideas about how the rogue black hole ended up offset in the galaxy, and so close to the supermassive black hole at its core. (The rogue black hole's mass is estimated to be roughly one million solar masses, at least ten times smaller than the black hole at the galactic center.) One option is that the black hole was at the center of a smaller galaxy that was subsumed by the larger galaxy, and now the black hole is simply drifting through the larger galaxy. Another possibility is that the black hole was the weakest link in what was once a three-body system, and was pushed out by the bigger objects; in other words, two larger black holes may lurk at the galaxy's core, and the rogue black hole was ejected thousands of light-years out. 'If the black hole went through a triple interaction with two other black holes in the galaxy's core, it can still remain bound to the galaxy, orbiting around the central region,' said Yuhan Yao, also a researcher at UC Berkeley and the lead author of the study, in the same release. But at the present moment, the team isn't sure if the black hole was pushed out or is being dragged in by the larger black hole. With future instruments like the Vera Rubin Observatory and the Roman Space Telescope coming online, astronomers are hopeful this is just the beginning of an entirely new class of discoveries. Because if there's anything more unsettling than a black hole swallowing a star, it's the idea that the hungry, hungry objects are just drifting through space in unexpected locations.
