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Watch This Black Hole Blow Bubbles
A black hole was seen shooting electrified gas and energy into space. Each blob contained about 400 million billion pounds of matter.
In another example of casual cosmic malevolence, astronomers published a movie last month of what they said was a black hole shooting blobs of electrified gas and energy into space at almost the speed of light.
From a distance — quite a distance, of some 10,000 light-years — the black hole looked like a cosmic pop gun, propelling puffs of light across the sky. Up close … well you wouldn’t want to be up close, as clouds of sterilizing radiation a trillion miles wide swept by.
The movie was compiled from optical, X-ray and radio observations of a troubled star named MAXI J182+070, located in the constellation Ophiuchus, by a group of researchers led by Mathilde Espinasse of the University of Paris. They published a report on this distant oblivion on May 29 to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The observations paint a familiar picture of brute forces at work strewing wreckage and change across an unforgiving universe. They will also help astronomers better understand how black holes produce the fireworks that they do, the authors said.
The star in question is actually two stars: a black hole, a gravitational pit, about eight times as massive as the sun; and a smaller star, with half the mass of the sun, that the black hole is feeding on. The black hole first came to notice in March 2018 when it underwent an outburst that was detected by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae, or ASAS-SN, a network of 24 robotic telescopes, located around the world and run by Ohio State University, that is ever on the lookout for strange things in the sky.
Black holes are often the corpses of stars that have died and collapsed. They are so dense that not even light can escape them, according to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. As a result, they are one-way passages to eternity for anything that enters. But they are sloppy, slow eaters; matter falling into a black hole must first traverse a hot doughnut of doom that swirls around the edge of the hole like water circling a drain. Pressures and magnetic fields in this hellish region can squeeze some of the super-energized matter outward in mighty jets.
In July of 2018, such an eruption tossed two clouds bristling with energy in opposite directions out of the MAXI J182+070 system. In an email, Dr. Espinasse likened the ejected material to soap bubbles, each about two-tenths of a light year in diameter. Except, she added, they are not spherical and were filled not with soap but with plasma, a highly energetic electrified gas.
Each bubble, her team estimated, contained about 400 million billion pounds of matter — about 1,000 Halley’s comets worth. It would not be fun to be caught in one of these as it went by, Dr. Espinasse said, as they brim with radiation.
“Consequences can be indirect,” she said. “A huge increase in cosmic rays during the Pliocene might have been indirectly responsible for the extinction of some ocean animals — not due to irradiation but due to damage to the ozone layer they created. So maybe crossing the path of a jet could indeed create a massive extinction, though we are a bit speculating here.”
As the bubbles traveled outward, they lit up the thin interstellar gas with a traveling light show.
One bubble went north, figuratively speaking, and the other south. Astronomers monitored them for the next year and a half with NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa.
The teams clocked the northern jet moving away from Earth at about 60 percent of the speed of light. The southern jet, coming toward us, appeared to be advancing across the sky at superluminal speed, more than one and a half times the speed of light — an impossible velocity, according to relativity, which established the speed of light as the cosmic speed limit. But when corrected for geometry, Dr. Espinasse and her co-authors concluded that both jets were traveling about 80 percent of the speed of light, safely below the speed limit
In total, she said, each bubble traveled a couple of light-years.
Sheperd Doeleman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and director of the Event Horizon Telescope, which captured the first image of a black hole last year, called the new paper a “cool article.” This new Ophiuchus black hole, he said, is “a tiny cousin” to the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies like our Milky Way and the hulking giant Messier 87 in Virgo.
“That said, this is a very nice result that shows the same ‘superluminal’ velocities we saw in the ‘blowtorch of the gods,’” Dr. Doeleman said in an email, referring to another recent report of a black hole erupting. “Black holes truly are the most efficient engines in the universe.”
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