LONG BEACH, Calif. – Astronomers have discovered what appears to be colossal belch from a massive black hole at the heart of a distant galaxy. The outburst was 10 times as bright as the biggest star explosion, scientists say.
The potential super-sized black hole
burp find came as astronomers studied the galaxy NGC 660, which is
located 44 million light-years away in the constellation Pisces.
"The discovery was entirely serendipitous. Our observations were spread
over a few years, and when we looked at them, we found that one galaxy
had changed over that time from being placid and quiescent to undergone a
hugely energetic outburst at the end," study researcher Robert Minchin
of Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico said in a statement.
To determine whether the outburst was from a supernova
— the explosive end of a star — or the galaxy's core, the researchers
used the High Sensitivity Array, a global network of telescopes that
includes the Very Long Baseline Array, the Arecibo Telescope, the NSF's
100-meter Green Bank Telescope, and the 100-meter Effelsberg Radio Telescope in Germany.
Instead of an expanding ring of material suggesting a supernova event,
the researchers found five locations with bright radio emissions
clustered around the galaxy's core.
"The most likely explanation is that there are jets coming from the
core, but they are precessing, or wobbling, and the hot spots we see are
where the jets slammed into the material near the galaxy's nucleus,"
said Chris Salter, also of the Arecibo Observatory.
Those jets, the researchers said, would mean the outburst likely came from a supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy NGC 660. As the black hole devours dust and mass, it pulls a whirling disk of matter into its heart that spews jets of particles as it is consumed.
Supermassive black holes
are colossal structures at the cores of galaxies that are between
millions and billions of times as massive as the sun. They are much
larger than stellar-mass black holes, which are created from the deaths of giant stars and can contain the mass of about 10 suns.
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