Black holes are regions of space-time that form following the death of a massive star and gravity is so strong that nothing around them can escape, and scientists still don’t know much regarding these highly gravitational cosmic bodies. It is located in deep space.
Throughout the year, astronomers gained new insights into black holes around the world, and here’s a list of black holes that will surprise us in 2022, RT reports.
1. A black hole destroys a star in a violent tidal disturbance event
A previously unknown black hole revealed its existence to astronomers when it tore apart and swallowed a nearby star.
The severe disturbance originated from a black hole with an average mass of between 100,000 and 1 million times that of the Sun in the dwarf galaxy SDSS J152120.07+140410.5, regarding 850 million light-years from Earth.
The star-shattering event, known as a “tidal disruption event” or TDE, produced a wave of radiation that briefly exceeded the combined light of the stars of the host dwarf galaxy, which may help scientists determine the relationship to better understand the gaps. black galaxies.
This “violent wave disturbance event” has been named AT 2020neh. Astronomers have previously used “violent wave perturbation events” to measure the mass of supermassive black holes, which range in size from millions to billions of solar masses.
However, AT 2020neh is the first time that a violent perturbation event has contributed to the analysis of clusters of small and medium-mass black holes.
2. The closest black hole to Earth
Last November, scientists announced the discovery of a new black hole that now holds the record for the closest known black hole to Earth.
Gaia BH1, 10 times more massive than our Sun, is only 1,560 light-years from our planet.
Gaia BH1 is in a binary system whose other partner is a Sun-like star. The star is as far away from its companion black hole as Earth is from the Sun, which makes Gaia BH1 very special.
3. The fastest growing black hole ever
Astronomers have discovered the fastest growing black hole ever, devouring the equivalent of Earth’s planet (Earth) at a rate of one per second. This black hole appears to be the fastest growing in the last 9 billion years.
The supermassive black hole known as J1144 is currently three billion times the mass of the Sun, making it 500 times more massive than the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way.
Matter ejected from the black hole’s surface creates a quasar – the very luminous heart of a galaxy – that emits enough energy to make it 7,000 times brighter than the light of any star in the Milky Way.
Altogether, this quasar (named SMSS J114447.77-430859.3) is the brightest known quasar in regarding two-thirds of the universe’s last 13.8 billion years.
4. A very distant black hole sends mysterious lightning to Earth
Last November, astronomers found the most famous example of a distant black hole tearing apart a star, thanks to the glow of the “residual” star that exploded directly on Earth.
The event, called AT2022cmc, occurred 8.5 billion light-years away and began flashing when the universe’s 13.8-billion-year-old age was only one-third of its current age.
Scientists estimate that the black hole eats regarding half of the sun’s mass each year.
In regarding 1% of these violent destruction events, known as violent tidal disturbance events (TDEs), the black hole ejects jets of plasma and radiation from its poles.
5. A black hole contains the remains of a star that ate many years ago
In 2022, three years following a black hole made a “dinner” from a star, scientists once once more observed the giant object spewing out the remains of its meal.
The strange event began in 2018, when scientists noticed that a young star was being torn apart by a black hole in a galaxy 665 million light-years away. Three years later, the black hole was discovered spewing material from its last meal.
“This completely surprised us — no one had seen anything like this before,” Yvette Sendes, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who led the study, said in a statement. From the star that ate years ago.
6. Discover the truth regarding the nearest black hole
This past March, astronomers revealed that what was thought to be the closest black hole to Earth does not, in fact, exist.
And in 2020, astronomers discovered evidence that HR 6819, just 1,000 light-years from Earth, is a triple system in which one star orbits closely around the black hole and the other in a wide orbit. However, other scientists have challenged the findings and this year managed to disprove their existence.
Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), they were able to obtain more detailed images of HR 6819 and found that it contains only two stars in a narrow orbit and no black holes. One star removes the other star’s mass, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “stellar vampirism”.
7. The number of black holes in the world
This past January, astronomers announced that the observable universe may contain 40,000,000,000,000,000 stellar-mass black holes, the equivalent of 40 quintillion, or 40 billion billion.
In total, these black holes make up 1% of all normal matter in the visible universe, which spans 93 billion light-years.
Scientists from the International College for Advanced Studies (SISSA) have used a new computational approach to estimate the number of such holes that are thought to have formed.
By analyzing the evolution of stars in the universe, scientists have estimated how often stars, either alone or in binary systems, turn into stellar-mass black holes, which are 5 to 10 times the mass of the Sun.
The team found that the largest stellar-mass black holes typically form from collisions of smaller black holes within star clusters — an idea that fits well with gravitational-wave data collected so far on black-hole collisions.
