Unexpected Periodic Flares May Shed Light on Black Hole Accretion
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Unexpected periodic flares may shed light on black hole accretion
ESA's X-ray space telescope XMM-Newton has detected never-before-seen periodic flares of X-ray radiation coming from a distant galaxy that could help explain some enigmatic behaviours of active black holes.
XMM-Newton, the most powerful X-ray observatory, discovered some mysterious flashes from the active black hole at the core of the galaxy GSN 069, about 250 million light years away. On 24 December 2018, the source was seen to suddenly increase its brightness by up to a factor 100, then dimmed back to its normal levels within one hour and lit up again nine hours later.
"It was completely unexpected," says Giovanni Miniutti, of the Centro de Astrobiologia in Madrid, Spain, lead author of a new paper published in the journal Nature today.
"Giant black holes regularly flicker like a candle but the rapid, repeating changes seen in GSN 069 from December onwards are something completely new."
Further observations, performed with XMM-Newton as well as NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory in the following couple of months, confirmed that the distant black hole was still keeping the tempo, emitting nearly periodic bursts of X-rays every nine hours. The researchers are calling the new phenomenon 'quasi-periodic eruptions," or QPEs.
"The X-ray emission comes from material that is being accreted into the black hole and heats up in the process," explains Giovanni.
. Miniutti et al. Nine-hour X-ray quasi-periodic eruptions from a low-mass black hole galactic nucleus, Nature (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1556-xJournal information:Nature
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