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 Astrobiología in Madrid, Spain, lead author of a new paper published in the journal Nature.
“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.
Optical and X-ray view
“The X-ray emission comes from material that is being accreted into the
black hole and heats up in the process,” explains Giovanni.
“There are various mechanisms in the accretion disc that could give rise to
this type of quasi-periodic signal, potentially linked to instabilities in the
accretion flow close to the central black hole.
“Alternatively, the eruptions could be due to the interaction of the disc
material with a second body – another black hole or perhaps the remnant of a
star previously disrupted by the black hole.”
Although never before observed, Giovanni and colleagues
think periodic flares like these might actually be quite common in the
Universe.
It is possible that the phenomenon had not been identified before because
most black holes at the cores of distant galaxies, with masses millions to
billions of times the mass of our Sun, are much larger than the one in GSN 069,
which is only about 400 000 times more massive than our Sun.
The bigger and more massive the black hole, the slower the fluctuations in
brightness it can display, so a typical supermassive black hole would erupt not
every nine hours, but every few months or years. This would make detection
unlikely as observations rarely span such long periods of time.
And there is more. Quasi-periodic eruptions like those found in GSN 069
could provide a natural framework to interpret some puzzling patterns observed
in a significant fraction of active black holes, whose brightness seems to vary
too fast to be easily explained by current theoretical models.
“We know of many massive black holes whose brightness rises or decays by
very large factors within days or months, while we would expect them to vary at
a much slower pace,” says Giovanni.
“But if some of this variability corresponds to the rise or decay phases of
eruptions similar to those discovered in GSN 069, then the fast variability of
these systems, which appears currently unfeasible, could naturally be accounted
for. New data and further studies will tell if this analogy really holds.”
Source & further reading: https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Unexpected_periodic_flares_may_shed_light_on_black_hole_accretion
Journal article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1556-x
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