Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics | 2015 July 23
[img3="A snapshot image from a computer simulation of a star disrupted by a supermassive black hole. The red-orange plumes show the debris of the star after its passage near the black hole (bottom left). About half of the disrupted star moves in elliptical orbits around the black hole and forms an accretion disc which eventually shines brightly in optical and X-rays. (Credit: J. Guillochon (Harvard) and E. Ramirez-Ruiz (UCSC))"]http://www.mpe.mpg.de/6375072/zoom.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]Using archival data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, as well as from the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray telescopes, a team of astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have discovered a gigantic black hole, which is probably destroying and devouring a big star in its vicinity. With a mass of 100 million times more than our Sun, this is the largest black hole caught in this act so far. The results of this study are published in this month’s issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Andrea Merloni and members of his team from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, near Munich, were exploring the huge archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in preparation for a future X-ray satellite mission. The SDSS has been observing a large fraction of the night sky with its optical telescope; in addition, spectra have been taken of distant galaxies and black holes. For a variety of reasons, some objects got the spectra taken more than once. And when the team was looking at one of the objects with multiple spectra, they were struck by an extraordinary change in one of the objects under study, with the catalogue number SDSS J0159+0033.
“Usually distant galaxies do not change significantly over an astronomer’s lifetime, i.e. on a timescale of years or decades,” explains Andrea Merloni, “but this one showed a dramatic variation of its spectrum, as if the central black hole had switched on and off.” ...
A tidal disruption flare in a massive galaxy? Implications for the fuelling mechanisms of nuclear black holes - A. Merloni et al
- Monthly Notices of the RAS 452(1) 69 (2015 Sep 01) DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stv1095
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1503.04870 > 16 Mar 2015 (v1), 12 May 2015 (v2)