365NEWSX
365NEWSX
Subscribe

Welcome

Quasi-Periodic Flickers in Millimeter-Waves Detected From Heart of Milky Way - SciTechDaily

Quasi-Periodic Flickers in Millimeter-Waves Detected From Heart of Milky Way - SciTechDaily

Quasi-Periodic Flickers in Millimeter-Waves Detected From Heart of Milky Way - SciTechDaily
May 22, 2020 1 min, 57 secs

Hot spots circling around the black hole could produce the quasi-periodic millimeter emission detected with ALMA.

Credit: Keio University.

The team interpreted these blinks to be due to the rotation of radio spots circling the supermassive black hole with an orbit radius smaller than that of Mercury.

“It has been known that Sgr A* sometimes flares up in millimeter wavelength,” tells Yuhei Iwata, the lead author of the paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters and a graduate student at Keio University, Japan.

Astronomers presume that a supermassive black hole with a mass of 4 million suns is located at the center of Sgr A*.

The black hole itself does not produce any kind of emission.

The source of the emission is the scorching gaseous disk around the black hole.

The gas around the black hole does not go straight to the gravitational well, but it rotates around the black hole to form an accretion disk.

The team focused on short timescale variations and found that the variation period of 30 minutes is comparable to the orbital period of the innermost edge of the accretion disk with the radius of 0.2 astronomical units (1 astronomical unit corresponds to the distance between the Earth and the Sun: 150 million kilometers).

Considering the colossal mass at the center of the black hole, its gravity effect is also extreme in the accretion disk.

“This emission could be related with some exotic phenomena occurring at the very vicinity of the supermassive black hole,” says Tomoharu Oka, a professor at Keio University. .

Hot spots are sporadically formed in the disk and circle around the black hole, emitting strong millimeter waves.

The astronomers believe that this is the origin of the short-term variation of the millimeter emission from Sgr A*.

The team supposes that the variation might affect the effort to make an image of the supermassive black hole with the Event Horizon Telescope.

We may witness the very moment of gas absorption by the black hole with a long-term monitoring campaign with ALMA.” The researchers aim to draw out independent information to understand the mystifying environment around the supermassive black hole.

Yuhei Iwata (Keio University), Tomoharu Oka (Keio University), Masato Tsuboi (Japan Space Exploration Agency/The University of Tokyo), Makoto Miyoshi (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan/SOKENDAI), and Shunya Takekawa (National Astronomical Observatory of Japan)

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

RECENT NEWS

SUBSCRIBE

Get monthly updates and free resources.

CONNECT WITH US

© Copyright 2024 365NEWSX - All RIGHTS RESERVED