Massachusetts Institute of Technology | 2018 Mar 19
Signals suggest black hole emits a jet of energy proportional to the stellar material it gobbles up.
On Nov. 11, 2014, a global network of telescopes picked up signals from 300 million light-years away that were created by a tidal disruption flare -- an explosion of electromagnetic energy that occurs when a black hole rips apart a passing star. Since this discovery, astronomers have trained other telescopes on this very rare event to learn more about how black holes devour matter and regulate the growth of galaxies.
Scientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University have now detected radio signals from the event that match very closely with X-ray emissions produced from the same flare 13 days earlier. They believe these radio “echoes,” which are more than 90 percent similar to the event’s X-ray emissions, are more than a passing coincidence. Instead, they appear to be evidence of a giant jet of highly energetic particles streaming out from the black hole as stellar material is falling in.
Dheeraj Pasham, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, says the highly similar patterns suggest that the power of the jet shooting out from the black hole is somehow controlled by the rate at which the black hole is feeding on the obliterated star. ...
Discovery of a Time Lag Between the Soft X-ray and Radio Emission of the
Tidal Disruption Flare ASASSN-14li: Evidence for Linear Disk-Jet Coupling - Dheeraj R. Pasham, Sjoert van Velzen
- Astrophysical Journal 856(1):1 (2018 Mar 20) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aab361
arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1709.02882 > 09 Sep 2017 (v1), 16 Mar 2018 (v2)
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