Black Hole's Heart Still Beating
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The first confirmed heartbeat of a supermassive black hole is still going strong more than ten years after first being observed.
X-ray satellite observations spotted the repeated beat after its signal had been blocked by our Sun for a number of years.
[...] The black hole's heartbeat was first detected in 2007 at the centre of a galaxy called RE J1034+396 which is approximately 600 million light years from Earth.
The signal from this galactic giant repeated every hour and this behaviour was seen in several snapshots taken before satellite observations were blocked by our Sun in 2011.
In 2018 the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellite was able to finally re-observe the black hole and to scientists' amazement the same repeated heartbeat could still be seen.
Matter falling on to a supermassive black hole as it feeds from the accretion disc of material surrounding it releases an enormous amount of power from a comparatively tiny region of space, but this is rarely seen as a specific repeatable pattern like a heartbeat.
The time between beats can tell us about the size and structure of the matter close to the black hole's event horizon.
Journal Reference:
Martin Ward, Chris Done, Chichuan Jin. Reobserving the NLS1 galaxy RE J1034 396 - I. The long-term, recurrent X-ray QPO with a high significance. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2020; 495 (4): 3538 DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1356
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