Supermassive black holes devour gas just like their petite counterparts

As a supermassive black hole consumed a star, researchers were surprised it exhibited properties that were similar to that of much smaller, stellar-mass black holes.Credits: Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT 

Regardless of size, all black holes experience similar accretion cycles, a new study finds.

On Sept. 9, 2018, astronomers spotted a flash from a galaxy 860 million light years away. The source was a supermassive black hole about 50 million times the mass of the sun. Normally quiet, the gravitational giant suddenly awoke to devour a passing star in a rare instance known as a tidal disruption event. As the stellar debris fell toward the black hole, it released an enormous amount of energy in the form of light.

Researchers at MIT, the European Southern Observatory, and elsewhere used multiple telescopes to keep watch on the event, labeled AT2018fyk. To their surprise, they observed that as the supermassive black hole consumed the star, it exhibited properties that were similar to that of much smaller, stellar-mass black holes.

The results, published today in the Astrophysical Journal, suggest that accretion, or the way black holes evolve as they consume material, is independent of their size.

“We’ve demonstrated that, if you’ve seen one black hole, you’ve seen them all, in a sense,” says study author Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham, a research scientist in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “When you throw a ball of gas at them, they all seem to do more or less the same thing. They’re the same beast in terms of their accretion.”

Pasham’s co-authors include principal research scientist Ronald Remillard and former graduate student Anirudh Chiti at MIT, along with researchers at the European Southern Observatory, Cambridge University, Leiden University, New York University, the University of Maryland, Curtin University, the University of Amsterdam, and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

A stellar wake-up

When small stellar-mass black holes with a mass about 10 times our sun emit a burst of light, it’s often in response to an influx of material from a companion star. This outburst of radiation sets off a specific evolution of the region around the black hole. From quiescence, a black hole transitions into a “soft” phase dominated by an accretion disk as stellar material is pulled into the black hole. As the amount of material influx drops, it transitions again to a “hard” phase where a white-hot corona takes over. The black hole eventually settles back into a steady quiescence, and this entire accretion cycle can last a few weeks to months.

Physicists have observed this characteristic accretion cycle in multiple stellar-mass black holes for several decades. But for supermassive black holes, it was thought that this process would take too long to capture entirely, as these goliaths are normally grazers, feeding slowly on gas in the central regions of a galaxy.

“This process normally happens on timescales of thousands of years in supermassive black holes,” Pasham says. “Humans cannot wait that long to capture something like this.”

But this entire process speeds up when a black hole experiences a sudden, huge influx of material, such as during a tidal disruption event, when a star comes close enough that a black hole can tidally rip it to shreds.

“In a tidal disruption event, everything is abrupt,” Pasham says. “You have a sudden chunk of gas being thrown at you, and the black hole is suddenly woken up, and it’s like, ‘whoa, there’s so much food — let me just eat, eat, eat until it’s gone.’ So, it experiences everything in a short timespan. That allows us to probe all these different accretion stages that people have known in stellar-mass black holes.”

A supermassive cycle

In September 2018, the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASASSN) picked up signals of a sudden flare. Scientists subsequently determined that the flare was the result of a tidal disruption event involving a supermassive black hole, which they labeled TDE AT2018fyk. Wevers, Pasham, and their colleagues jumped at the alert and were able to steer multiple telescopes, each trained to map different bands of the ultraviolet and X-ray spectrum, toward the system.

The team collected data over two years, using X-ray space telescopes XMM-Newton and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, as well as NICER, the X-ray-monitoring instrument aboard the International Space Station, and the Swift Observatory, along with radio telescopes in Australia.

“We caught the black hole in the soft state with an accretion disk forming, and most of the emission in ultraviolet, with very few in the X-ray,” Pasham says. “Then the disk collapses, the corona gets stronger, and now it’s very bright in X-rays. Eventually there’s not much gas to feed on, and the overall luminosity drops and goes back to undetectable levels.”

The researchers estimate that the black hole tidally disrupted a star about the size of our sun. In the process, it generated an enormous accretion disk, about 12 billion kilometers wide, and emitted gas that they estimated to be about 40,000 Kelvin, or more than 70,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As the disk became weaker and less bright, a corona of compact, high-energy X-rays took over as the dominant phase around the black hole before eventually fading away.

“People have known this cycle to happen in stellar-mass black holes, which are only about 10 solar masses. Now we are seeing this in something 5 million times bigger,” Pasham says.

“The most exciting prospect for the future is that such tidal disruption events provide a window into the formation of complex structures very close to the supermassive black hole such as the accretion disk and the corona,” says lead author Thomas Wevers, a fellow at the European Southern Observatory. “Studying how these structures form and interact in the extreme environment following the destruction of a star, we can hopefully start to better understand the fundamental physical laws that govern their existence.”

In addition to showing that black holes experience accretion in the same way, regardless of their size, the results represent only the second time that scientists have captured the formation of a corona from beginning to end.

“A corona is a very mysterious entity, and in the case of supermassive black holes, people have studied established coronas but don’t know when or how they formed,” Pasham says. “We’ve demonstrated you can use tidal disruption events to capture corona formation. I’m excited about using these events in the future to figure out what exactly is the corona.”

This research was partially supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

 

Source:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT/News

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This is how a “fuzzy” universe may have looked

A simulation of early galaxy formation under three dark matter scenarios. In a universe filled with cold dark matter, early galaxies would first form in bright halos (far left). If dark matter is instead warm, galaxies would form first in long, tail-like filaments (center). Fuzzy dark matter would produce similar filaments, though striated (far right), like the strings of a harp.  Image courtesy of the researchers

Scientists simulate early galaxy formation in a universe of dark matter that is ultralight, or “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm.

Dark matter was likely the starting ingredient for brewing up the very first galaxies in the universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, particles of dark matter would have clumped together in gravitational “halos,” pulling surrounding gas into their cores, which over time cooled and condensed into the first galaxies. 

Although dark matter is considered the backbone to the structure of the universe, scientists know very little about its nature, as the particles have so far evaded detection.

Now scientists at MIT, Princeton University, and Cambridge University have found that the early universe, and the very first galaxies, would have looked very different depending on the nature of dark matter. For the first time, the team has simulated what early galaxy formation would have looked like if dark matter were “fuzzy,” rather than cold or warm.

In the most widely accepted scenario, dark matter is cold, made up of slow-moving particles that, aside from gravitational effects, have no interaction with ordinary matter. Warm dark matter is thought to be a slightly lighter and faster version of cold dark matter. And fuzzy dark matter, a relatively new concept, is something entirely different, consisting of ultralight particles, each about 1 octillionth (10-27) the mass of an electron (a cold dark matter particle is far heavier — about 105 times more massive than an electron).

In their simulations, the researchers found that if dark matter is cold, then galaxies in the early universe would have formed in nearly spherical halos. But if the nature of dark matter is fuzzy or warm, the early universe would have looked very different, with galaxies forming first in extended, tail-like filaments. In a fuzzy universe, these filaments would have appeared striated, like star-lit strings on a harp.

As new telescopes come online, with the ability to see further back into the early universe, scientists may be able to deduce, from the pattern of galaxy formation, whether the nature of dark matter, which today makes up nearly 85 percent of the matter in the universe, is fuzzy as opposed to cold or warm.

“The first galaxies in the early universe may illuminate what type of dark matter we have today,” says Mark Vogelsberger, associate professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “Either we see this filament pattern, and fuzzy dark matter is plausible, or we don’t, and we can rule that model out. We now have a blueprint for how to do this.”

Vogelsberger is a co-author of a paper appearing today in Physical Review Letters, along with the paper’s lead author, Philip Mocz of Princeton University, and Anastasia Fialkov of Cambridge University and previously the University of Sussex.

Fuzzy waves

While dark matter has yet to be directly detected, the hypothesis that describes dark matter as cold has proven successful at describing the large-scale structure of the observable universe. As a result, models of galaxy formation are based on the assumption that dark matter is cold.

“The problem is, there are some discrepancies between observations and predictions of cold dark matter,” Vogelsberger points out. “For example, if you look at very small galaxies, the inferred distribution of dark matter within these galaxies doesn’t perfectly agree with what theoretical models predict. So there is tension there.”

Enter, then, alternative theories for dark matter, including warm, and fuzzy, which researchers have proposed in recent years.

“The nature of dark matter is still a mystery,” Fialkov says. “Fuzzy dark matter is motivated by fundamental physics, for instance, string theory, and thus is an interesting dark matter candidate. Cosmic structures hold the key to validating or ruling out such dark matter modles.”

Fuzzy dark matter is made up of particles that are so light that they act in a quantum, wave-like fashion, rather than as individual particles. This quantum, fuzzy nature, Mocz says, could have produced early galaxies that look entirely different from what standard models predict for cold dark matter.

“Even though in the late universe these different dark matter scenarios may predict similar shapes for galaxies, the first galaxies would be strikingly different, which will give us a clue about what dark matter is,” Mocz says.

To see how different a cold and a fuzzy early universe could be, the researchers simulated a small, cubic space of the early universe, measuring about 3 million light years across, and ran it forward in time to see how galaxies would form given one of the three dark matter scenarios: cold, warm, and fuzzy.

The team began each simulation by assuming a certain distribution of dark matter, which scientists have some idea of, based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background — “relic radiation” that was emitted by, and was detected just 400,000 years after, the Big Bang.

“Dark matter doesn’t have a constant density, even at these early times,” Vogelsberger says. “There are tiny perturbations on top of a constant density field.”

The researchers were able to use existing algorithms to simulate galaxy formation under scenarios of cold and warm dark matter. But to simulate fuzzy dark matter, with its quantum nature, they needed a new approach.

A map of harp strings

The researchers modified their simulation of cold dark matter, enabling it to solve two extra equations in order to simulate galaxy formation in a fuzzy dark matter universe. The first, Schrödinger’s equation, describes how a quantum particle acts as a wave, while the second, Poisson’s equation, describes how that wave generates a density field, or distribution of dark matter, and how that distribution leads to gravity — the force that eventually pulls in matter to form galaxies. They then coupled this simulation to a model that describes the behavior of gas in the universe, and the way it condenses into galaxies in response to gravitational effects.

In all three scenarios, galaxies formed wherever there were over-densities, or large concentrations of gravitationally collapsed dark matter. The pattern of this dark matter, however, was different, depending on whether it was cold, warm, or fuzzy.

In a scenario of cold dark matter, galaxies formed in spherical halos, as well as smaller subhalos. Warm dark matter produced first galaxies in tail-like filaments, and no subhalos. This may be due to warm dark matter’s lighter, faster nature, making particles less likely to stick around in smaller, subhalo clumps.

Similar to warm dark matter, fuzzy dark matter formed stars along filaments. But then quantum wave effects took over in shaping the galaxies, which formed more striated filaments, like strings on an invisible harp. Vogelsberger says this striated pattern is due to interference, an effect that occurs when two waves overlap. When this occurs, for instance in waves of light, the points where the crests and troughs of each wave align form darker spots, creating an alternating pattern of bright and dark regions. In the case of fuzzy dark matter, instead of bright and dark points, it generates an alternating pattern of over-dense and under-dense concentrations of dark matter.

“You would get a lot of gravitational pull at these over-densities, and the gas would follow, and at some point would form galaxies along those over-densities, and not the under-densities,” Vogelsberger explains. “This picture would be replicated throughout the early universe.”

The team is developing more detailed predictions of what early galaxies may have looked like in a universe dominated by fuzzy dark matter. Their goal is to provide a map for upcoming telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, that may be able to look far enough back in time to spot the earliest galaxies. If they see filamentary galaxies such as those simulated by Mocz, Fialkov, Vogelsberger, and their colleagues, it could be the first signs that dark matter’s nature is fuzzy.

“It’s this observational test we can provide for the nature of dark matter, based on observations of the early universe, which will become feasible in the next couple of years,” Vogelsberger says.

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

Source: MIT/News

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Explosions of universe’s first stars spewed powerful jets

A simulation shows what the first supernovae could have looked like: Instead of spherical as many scientists have assumed, these brilliant explosions may have been asymmetric jets that shot heavy elements such as zinc (green dots) out into the early universe. This simulation shows the shape of the supernova, 50 seconds after the initial explosion.  Image: Melanie Gonick

Rana Ezzeddine and Anna Frebel of MIT have observed evidence that the first stars in the universe exploded as asymmetric supernova, strong enough to scatter heavy elements such as zinc across the early universe. Image: Melanie Gonick

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Instead of ballooning into spheres, as once thought, early supernovae ejected jets that may have seeded new stars.

Several hundred million years after the Big Bang, the very first stars flared into the universe as massively bright accumulations of hydrogen and helium gas. Within the cores of these first stars, extreme, thermonuclear reactions forged the first heavier elements, including carbon, iron, and zinc.

These first stars were likely immense, short-lived fireballs, and scientists have assumed that they exploded as similarly spherical supernovae.

But now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have found that these first stars may have blown apart in a more powerful, asymmetric fashion, spewing forth jets that were violent enough to eject heavy elements into neighboring galaxies. These elements ultimately served as seeds for the second generation of stars, some of which can still be observed today.

In a paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal, the researchers report a strong abundance of zinc in HE 1327-2326, an ancient, surviving star that is among the universe’s second generation of stars. They believe the star could only have acquired such a large amount of zinc after an asymmetric explosion of one of the very first stars had enriched its birth gas cloud.

“When a star explodes, some proportion of that star gets sucked into a black hole like a vacuum cleaner,” says Anna Frebel, an associate professor of physics at MIT and a member of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “Only when you have some kind of mechanism, like a jet that can yank out material, can you observe that material later in a next-generation star. And we believe that’s exactly what could have happened here.”

“This is the first observational evidence that such an asymmetric supernova took place in the early universe,” adds MIT postdoc Rana Ezzeddine, the study’s lead author. “This changes our understanding of how the first stars exploded.”

“A sprinkle of elements”

HE 1327-2326 was discovered by Frebel in 2005. At the time, the star was the most metal-poor star ever observed, meaning that it had extremely low concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium — an indication that it formed as part of the second generation of stars, at a time when most of the universe’s heavy element content had yet to be forged.

“The first stars were so massive that they had to explode almost immediately,” Frebel says. “The smaller stars that formed as the second generation are still available today, and they preserve the early material left behind by these first stars. Our star has just a sprinkle of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, so we know it must have formed as part of the second generation of stars.”

In May of 2016, the team was able to observe the star which orbits close to Earth, just 5,000 light years away. The researchers won time on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope over two weeks, and recorded the starlight over multiple orbits. They used an instrument aboard the telescope, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to measure the minute abundances of various elements within the star.

The spectrograph is designed with high precision to pick up faint ultraviolet light. Some of those wavelength are absorbed by certain elements, such as zinc. The researchers made a list of heavy elements that they suspected might be within such an ancient star, that they planned to look for in the UV data, including silicon, iron, phosophorous, and zinc.

“I remember getting the data, and seeing this zinc line pop out, and we couldn’t believe it, so we redid the analysis again and again,” Ezzeddine recalls. “We found that, no matter how we measured it, we got this really strong abundance of zinc.”

A star channel opens

Frebel and Ezzeddine then contacted their collaborators in Japan, who specialize in developing simulations of supernovae and the secondary stars that form in their aftermath. The researchers ran over 10,000 simulations of supernovae, each with different explosion energies, configurations, and other parameters. They found that while most of the spherical supernova simulations were able to produce a secondary star with the elemental compositions the researchers observed in HE 1327-2326, none of them reproduced the zinc signal.

As it turns out, the only simulation that could explain the star’s makeup, including its high abundance of zinc, was one of an aspherical, jet-ejecting supernova of a first star. Such a supernova would have been extremely explosive, with a power equivalent to about a nonillion times (that’s 10 with 30 zeroes after it) that of a hydrogen bomb.

“We found this first supernova was much more energetic than people have thought before, about five to 10 times more,” Ezzeddine says. “In fact, the previous idea of the existence of a dimmer supernova to explain the second-generation stars may soon need to be retired.”

The team’s results may shift scientists’ understanding of reionization, a pivotal period during which the gas in the universe morphed from being completely neutral, to ionized — a state that made it possible for galaxies to take shape.

“People thought from early observations that the first stars were not so bright or energetic, and so when they exploded, they wouldn’t participate much in reionizing the universe,” Frebel says. “We’re in some sense rectifying this picture and showing, maybe the first stars had enough oomph when they exploded, and maybe now they are strong contenders for contributing to reionization, and for wreaking havoc in their own little dwarf galaxies.”

These first supernovae could have also been powerful enough to shoot heavy elements into neighboring “virgin galaxies” that had yet to form any stars of their own.

“Once you have some heavy elements in a hydrogen and helium gas, you have a much easier time forming stars, especially little ones,” Frebel says. “The working hypothesis is, maybe second generation stars of this kind formed in these polluted virgin systems, and not in the same system as the supernova explosion itself, which is always what we had assumed, without thinking in any other way. So this is opening up a new channel for early star formation.”

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT/News

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Astronomers observe evolution of a black hole as it wolfs down stella

X-ray echoes, mapped by NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER), revealed changes to the accretion disk and corona of black hole MAXI J1820+070. Image: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Halo of highly energized electrons around the black hole contracts dramatically during feeding frenzy

On March 11, an instrument aboard the International Space Station detected an enormous explosion of X-ray light that grew to be six times as bright as the Crab Nebula, nearly 10,000 light years away from Earth. Scientists determined the source was a black hole caught in the midst of an outburst — an extreme phase in which a black hole can spew brilliant bursts of X-ray energy as it devours an avalanche of gas and dust from a nearby star.

Now astronomers from MIT and elsewhere have detected “echoes” within this burst of X-ray emissions, that they believe could be a clue to how black holes evolve during an outburst. In a study published today in the journal Nature, the team reports evidence that as the black hole consumes enormous amounts of stellar material, its corona — the halo of highly-energized electrons that surrounds a black hole — significantly shrinks, from an initial expanse of about 100 kilometers (about the width of Massachusetts) to a mere 10 kilometers, in just over a month.

The findings are the first evidence that the corona shrinks as a black hole feeds, or accretes. The results also suggest that it is the corona that drives a black hole’s evolution during the most extreme phase of its outburst.

“This is the first time that we’ve seen this kind of evidence that it’s the corona shrinking during this particular phase of outburst evolution,” says Jack Steiner, a research scientist in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “The corona is still pretty mysterious, and we still have a loose understanding of what it is. But we now have evidence that the thing that’s evolving in the system is the structure of the corona itself.”

Steiner’s MIT co-authors include Ronald Remillard and first author Erin Kara.

X-ray echoes

The black hole detected on March 11 was named MAXI J1820+070, for the instrument that detected it. The Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) mission is a set of X-ray detectors installed in the Japanese Experiment Module of the International Space Station (ISS), that monitors the entire sky for X-ray outbursts and flares.

Soon after the instrument picked up the black hole’s outburst, Steiner and his colleagues started observing the event with NASA’s Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER, another instrument aboard the ISS, which was designed partly by MIT, to measure the amount and timing of incoming X-ray photons.

“This boomingly bright black hole came on the scene, and it was almost completely unobscured, so we got a very pristine view of what was going on,” Steiner says.

A typical outburst can occur when a black hole sucks away enormous amounts of material from a nearby star. This material accumulates around the black hole, in a swirling vortex known as an accretion disk, which can span millions of miles across. Material in the disk that is closer to the center of the black hole spins faster, generating friction that heats up the disk.

“The gas in the center is millions of degrees in temperature,” Steiner says. “When you heat something that hot, it shines out as X-rays. This disk can undergo avalanches and pour its gas down onto the central black hole at about a Mount Everest’s worth of gas per second. And that’s when it goes into outburst, which usually lasts about a year.”

Scientists have previously observed that X-ray photons emitted by the accretion disk can ping-pong off high-energy electrons in a black hole’s corona. Steiner says some of these photons can scatter “out to infinity,” while others scatter back onto the accretion disk as higher-energy X-rays.

By using NICER, the team was able to collect extremely precise measurements of both the energy and timing of X-ray photons throughout the black hole’s outburst. Crucially, they picked up “echoes,” or lags between low-energy photons (those that may have initially been emitted by the accretion disk) and high-energy photons (the X-rays that likely had interacted with the corona’s electrons). Over the course of a month, the researchers observed that the length of these lags decreased significantly, indicating that the distance between the corona and the accretion disk was also shrinking. But was it the disk or the corona that was shifting in?

To answer this, the researchers measured a signature that astronomers know as the “iron line” — a feature that is emitted by the iron atoms in an accretion disk only when they are energized, such as by the reflection of X-ray photons off a corona’s electrons. Iron, therefore, can measure the inner boundary of an accretion disk.

When the researchers measured the iron line throughout the outburst, they found no measurable change, suggesting that the disk itself was not shifting in shape, but remaining relatively stable. Together with the evidence of a diminishing X-ray lag, they concluded that it must be the corona that was changing, and shrinking as a result of the black hole’s outburst.

“We see that the corona starts off as this bloated, 100-kilometer blob inside the inner accretion disk, then shrinks down to something like 10 kilometers, over about a month,” Steiner says. “This is the first unambiguous case of a corona shrinking while the disk is stable.”

“NICER has allowed us to measure light echoes closer to a stellar-mass black hole than ever before,” Kara adds. “Previously these light echoes off the inner accretion disk were only seen in supermassive black holes, which are millions to billions of solar masses and evolve over millions of years. Stellar black holes like J1820 have much lower masses and evolve much faster, so we can see changes play out on human time scales.”

While it’s unclear what is exactly causing the corona to contract, Steiner speculates that the cloud of high-energy electrons is being squeezed by the overwhelming pressure generated by the accretion disk’s in-falling avalanche of gas.

The findings offer new insights into an important phase of a black hole’s outburst, known as a transition from a hard to a soft state. Scientists have known that at some point early on in an outburst, a black hole shifts from a “hard” phase that is dominated by the corona’s energy, to a “soft” phase that is ruled more by the accretion disk’s emissions.

“This transition marks a fundamental change in a black hole’s mode of accretion,” Steiner says. “But we don’t know exactly what’s going on. How does a black hole transition from being dominated by a corona to its disk? Does the disk move in and take over, or does the corona change and dissipate in some way? This is something people have been trying to unravel for decades And now this is a definitive piece of work in regards to what’s happening in this transition phase, and that what’s changing is the corona.”

This research is supported, in part, by NASA through the NICER mission and the Astrophysics Explorers Program.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Source: MIT/News

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Sprawling galaxy cluster found hiding in plain sight

An X-ray image (in blue) with a zoom in optical image (gold and brown) showing the central galaxy of a hidden cluster, which harbors a supermassive black hole. Image: Taweewat Somboonpanyakul

Bright light from black hole in a feeding frenzy had been obscuring surrounding galaxies

MIT scientists have uncovered a sprawling new galaxy cluster hiding in plain sight. The cluster, which sits a mere 2.4 billion light years from Earth, is made up of hundreds of individual galaxies and surrounds an extremely active supermassive black hole, or quasar.

The central quasar goes by the name PKS1353-341 and is intensely bright — so bright that for decades astronomers observing it in the night sky have assumed that the quasar was quite alone in its corner of the universe, shining out as a solitary light source from the center of a single galaxy.

But as the MIT team reports today in the Astrophysical Journal, the quasar’s light is so bright that it has obscured hundreds of galaxies clustered around it.

In their new analysis, the researchers estimate that there are hundreds of individual galaxies in the cluster, which, all told, is about as massive as 690 trillion suns. Our Milky Way galaxy, for comparison, weighs in at around 400 billion solar masses.

The team also calculates that the quasar at the center of the cluster is 46 billion times brighter than the sun. Its extreme luminosity is likely the result of a temporary feeding frenzy: As an immense disk of material swirls around the quasar, big chunks of matter from the disk are falling in and feeding it, causing the black hole to radiate huge amounts of energy out as light.

“This might be a short-lived phase that clusters go through, where the central black hole has a quick meal, gets bright, and then fades away again,” says study author Michael McDonald, assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “This could be a blip that we just happened to see. In a million years, this might look like a diffuse fuzzball.”

McDonald and his colleagues believe the discovery of this hidden cluster shows there may be other similar galaxy clusters hiding behind extremely bright objects that astronomers have miscatalogued as single light sources. The researchers are now looking for more hidden galaxy clusters, which could be important clues to estimating how much matter there is in the universe and how fast the universe is expanding.

The paper’s co-authors include lead author and MIT graduate student Taweewat Somboonpanyakul, Henry Lin of Princeton University, Brian Stalder of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and Antony Stark of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Fluffs or points

In 2012, McDonald and others discovered the Phoenix cluster, one of the most massive and luminous galaxy clusters in the universe. The mystery to McDonald was why this cluster, which was so intensely bright and in a region of the sky that is easily observable, hadn’t been found before.

“We started asking ourselves why we had not found it earlier, because it’s very extreme in its properties and very bright,” McDonald says. “It’s because we had preconceived notions of what a cluster should look like. And this didn’t conform to that, so we missed it.”

For the most part, he says astronomers have assumed that galaxy clusters look “fluffy,” giving off a very diffuse signal in the X-ray band, unlike brighter, point-like sources, which have been interpreted as extremely active quasars or black holes.

“The images are either all points, or fluffs, and the fluffs are these giant million-light-year balls of hot gas that we call clusters, and the points are black holes that are accreting gas and glowing as this gas spirals in,” McDonald says. “This idea that you could have a rapidly accreting black hole at the center of a cluster — we didn’t think that was something that happened in nature.”

But the Phoenix discovery proved that galaxy clusters could indeed host immensely active black holes, prompting McDonald to wonder: Could there be other nearby galaxy clusters that were simply misidentified?

An extreme eater

To answer that question, the researchers set up a survey named CHiPS, for Clusters Hiding in Plain Sight, which is designed to reevaluate X-ray images taken in the past.

“We start from archival data of point sources, or objects that were super bright in the sky,” Somboonpanyakul explains. “We are looking for point sources inside fluffy things.”

For every point source that was previously identified, the researchers noted their coordinates and then studied them more directly using the Magellan Telescope, a powerful optical telescope that sits in the mountains of Chile. If they observed a higher-than-expected number of galaxies surrounding the point source (a sign that the gas may stem from a cluster of galaxies), the researchers looked at the source again, using NASA’s space-based Chandra X-Ray Observatory, to identify an extended, diffuse source around the main point source.

“Some 90 percent of these sources turned out to not be clusters,” McDonald says. “But the fun thing is, the small number of things we are finding are sort of rule-breakers.”

The new paper reports the first results of the CHiPS survey, which has so far confirmed one new galaxy cluster hosting an extremely active central black hole.

“The brightness of the black hole might be related to how much it’s eating,” McDonald says. “This is thousands of times brighter than a typical black hole at the center of a cluster, so it’s very extreme in its feeding. We have no idea how long this has been going on or will continue to go on. Finding more of these things will help us understand, is this an important process, or just a weird thing that there’s only one of in the universe.”

The team plans to comb through more X-ray data in search of galaxy clusters that might have been missed the first time around.

“If the CHiPS survey can find enough of these, we will be able to pinpoint the specific rate of accretion onto the black hole where it switches from generating primarily radiation to generating mechanical energy, the two primary forms of energy output from black holes,” says Brian McNamara, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Waterloo, who was not involved in the research. “This particular object is interesting because it bucks the trend. Either the central supermassive black hole’s mass is much lower than expected, or the structure of the accretion flow is abnormal. The oddballs are the ones that teach us the most.”

In addition to shedding light on a black hole’s feeding, or accretion behavior, the detection of more galaxy clusters may help to estimate how fast the universe is expanding.

“Take for instance, the Titanic,” McDonald says. “If you know where the two biggest pieces landed, you could map them backward to see where the ship hit the iceberg. In the same way, if you know where all the galaxy clusters are in the universe, which are the biggest pieces in the universe, and how big they are, and you have some information about what the universe looked like in the beginning, which we know from the Big Bang, then you could map out how the universe expanded.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Kavli Research Investment Fund at MIT, and by NASA.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Source: Mit/News

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Could gravitational waves reveal how fast our universe is expanding?

Artist’s depiction of the last instances of a neutron star and black hole merger, as the neutron star is destroyed by the tidal pull of the black hole (at the center of the disk). Image: A. Tonita, L. Rezzolla, F. Pannarale

Signals from rare black hole-neutron star pairs could pinpoint rate at which universe is growing, researchers say.

Since it first exploded into existence 13.8 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding, dragging along with it hundreds of billions of galaxies and stars, much like raisins in a rapidly rising dough.

Astronomers have pointed telescopes to certain stars and other cosmic sources to measure their distance from Earth and how fast they are moving away from us — two parameters that are essential to estimating the Hubble constant, a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which the universe is expanding.

But to date, the most precise efforts have landed on very different values of the Hubble constant, offering no definitive resolution to exactly how fast the universe is growing. This information, scientists believe, could shed light on the universe’s origins, as well as its fate, and whether the cosmos will expand indefinitely or ultimately collapse.

Now scientists from MIT and Harvard University have proposed a more accurate and independent way to measure the Hubble constant, using gravitational waves emitted by a relatively rare system: a black hole-neutron star binary, a hugely energetic pairing of a spiraling black hole and a neutron star. As these objects circle in toward each other, they should produce space-shaking gravitational waves and a flash of light when they ultimately collide.

In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, the researchers report that the flash of light would give scientists an estimate of the system’s velocity, or how fast it is moving away from the Earth. The emitted gravitational waves, if detected on Earth, should provide an independent and precise measurement of the system’s distance. Even though black hole-neutron star binaries are incredibly rare, the researchers calculate that detecting even a few should yield the most accurate value yet for the Hubble constant and the rate of the expanding universe.

“Black hole-neutron star binaries are very complicated systems, which we know very little about,” says Salvatore Vitale, assistant professor of physics at MIT and lead author of the paper. “If we detect one, the prize is that they can potentially give a dramatic contribution to our understanding of the universe.”

Vitale’s co-author is Hsin-Yu Chen of Harvard.

Competing constants

Two independent measurements  of the Hubble constant were made recently, one using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and another using the European Space Agency's Planck satellite. The Hubble Space Telescope’s measurement is based on observations of a type of star known as a Cepheid variable, as well as on observations of supernovae. Both of these objects are considered “standard candles,” for their predictable pattern of brightness, which scientists can use to estimate the star’s distance and velocity.

The other type of estimate is based on observations of the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — the electromagnetic radiation that was left over in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang, when the universe was still in its infancy. While the observations by both probes are extremely precise, their estimates of the Hubble constant disagree significantly.

“That’s where LIGO comes into the game,” Vitale says.

LIGO, or the Laser Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatory, detects gravitational waves — ripples in the Jell-O of space-time, produced by cataclysmic astrophysical phenomena.

“Gravitational waves provide a very direct and easy way of measuring the distances of their sources,” Vitale says. “What we detect with LIGO is a direct imprint of the distance to the source, without any extra analysis.”

In 2017, scientists got their first chance at estimating the Hubble constant from a gravitational-wave source, when LIGO and its Italian counterpart Virgo detected a pair of colliding neutron stars for the first time. The collision released a huge amount of gravitational waves, which researchers measured to determine the distance of the system from Earth. The merger also released a flash of light, which astronomers focused on with ground and space telescopes to determine the system’s velocity.

With both measurements, scientists calculated a new value for the Hubble constant. However, the estimate came with a relatively large uncertainty of 14 percent, much more uncertain than the values calculated using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Planck satellite.

Vitale says much of the uncertainty stems from the fact that it can be challenging to interpret a neutron star binary’s distance from Earth using the gravitational waves that this particular system gives off.   

“We measure distance by looking at how ‘loud’ the gravitational wave is, meaning how clear it is in our data,” Vitale says. “If it’s very clear, you can see how loud it is, and that gives the distance. But that’s only partially true for neutron star binaries.”

That’s because these systems, which create a whirling disc of energy as two neutron stars spiral in toward each other, emit gravitational waves in an uneven fashion. The majority of gravitational waves shoot straight out from the center of the disc, while a much smaller fraction escapes out the edges. If scientists detect a “loud” gravitational wave signal, it could indicate one of two scenarios: the detected waves stemmed from the edge of a system that is very close to Earth, or the waves emanated from the center of a much further system.

“With neutron star binaries, it’s very hard to distinguish between these two situations,” Vitale says.

A new wave

In 2014, before LIGO made the first detection of gravitational waves, Vitale and his colleagues observed that a binary system composed of a black hole and a neutron star could give a more accurate distance measurement, compared with neutron star binaries. The team was investigating how accurately one could measure a black hole’s spin, given that the objects are known to spin on their axes, similarly to Earth but much more quickly.

The researchers simulated a variety of systems with black holes, including black hole-neutron star binaries and neutron star binaries. As a byproduct of this effort, the team noticed that they were able to more accurately determine the distance of black hole-neutron star binaries, compared to neutron star binaries. Vitale says this is due to the spin of the black hole around the neutron star, which can help scientists better pinpoint from where in the system the gravitational waves are emanating.

“Because of this better distance measurement, I thought that black hole-neutron star binaries could be a competitive probe for measuring the Hubble constant,” Vitale says. “Since then, a lot has happened with LIGO and the discovery of gravitational waves, and all this was put on the back burner.”

Vitale recently circled back to his original observation, and in this new paper, he set out to answer a theoretical question:

“Is the fact that every black hole-neutron star binary will give me a better distance going to compensate for the fact that potentially, there are far fewer of them in the universe than neutron star binaries?” Vitale says.

To answer this question, the team ran simulations to predict the occurrence of both types of binary systems in the universe, as well as the accuracy of their distance measurements. From their calculations, they concluded that, even if neutron binary systems outnumbered black hole-neutron star systems by 50-1, the latter would yield a Hubble constant similar in accuracy to the former.

More optimistically, if black hole-neutron star binaries were slightly more common, but still rarer than neutron star binaries, the former would produce a Hubble constant that is four times as accurate.

“So far, people have focused on binary neutron stars as a way of measuring the Hubble constant with gravitational waves,” Vitale says. “We’ve shown there is another type of gravitational wave source which so far has not been exploited as much: black holes and neutron stars spiraling together,” Vitale says. “LIGO will start taking data again in January 2019, and it will be much more sensitive, meaning we’ll be able to see objects farther away. So LIGO should see at least one black hole-neutron star binary, and as many as 25, which will help resolve the existing tension in the measurement of the Hubble constant, hopefully in the next few years.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the LIGO Laboratory.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Source:  Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT

Scientists identify a black hole choking on stardust

In this artist's rendering, a thick accretion disk has formed around a supermassive black hole following the tidal disruption of a star that wandered too close. Stellar debris has fallen toward the black hole and collected into a thick chaotic disk of hot gas. Flashes of X-ray light near the center of the disk result in light echoes that allow astronomers to map the structure of the funnel-like flow, revealing for the first time strong gravity effects around a normally quiescent black hole. Image: NASA/Swift/Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University

Data suggest black holes swallow stellar debris in bursts.

In the center of a distant galaxy, almost 300 million light years from Earth, scientists have discovered a supermassive black hole that is “choking” on a sudden influx of stellar debris.

In a paper published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers from MIT, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and elsewhere report on a “tidal disruption flare” — a dramatic burst of electromagnetic activity that occurs when a black hole obliterates a nearby star. The flare was first discovered on Nov. 11, 2014, and scientists have since trained a variety of telescopes on the event to learn more about how black holes grow and evolve.

The MIT-led team looked through data collected by two different telescopes and identified a curious pattern in the energy emitted by the flare: As the obliterated star’s dust fell into the black hole, the researchers observed small fluctuations in the optical and ultraviolet (UV) bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. This very same pattern repeated itself 32 days later, this time in the X-ray band.

The researchers used simulations of the event performed by others to infer that such energy “echoes” were produced from the following scenario: As a star migrated close to the black hole, it was quickly ripped apart by the black hole’s gravitational energy. The resulting stellar debris, swirling ever closer to the black hole, collided with itself, giving off bursts of optical and UV light at the collision sites. As it was pulled further in, the colliding debris heated up, producing X-ray flares, in the same pattern as the optical bursts, just before the debris fell into the black hole.

“In essence, this black hole has not had much to feed on for a while, and suddenly along comes an unlucky star full of matter,” says Dheeraj Pasham, the paper’s first author and a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “What we’re seeing is, this stellar material is not just continuously being fed onto the black hole, but it’s interacting with itself — stopping and going, stopping and going. This is telling us that the black hole is ‘choking’ on this sudden supply of stellar debris.”

Pasham’s co-authors include MIT Kavli postdoc Aleksander Sadowski and researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Maryland, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Columbia University, and Johns Hopkins University. A “lucky” sighting

Pasham says tidal disruption flares are a potential window into the universe’s many “hidden” black holes, which are not actively accreting, or feeding on material.

“Almost every massive galaxy contains a supermassive black hole,” Pasham says. “But we won’t know about them if they’re sitting around doing nothing, unless there’s an event like a tidal disruption flare.”

Such flares occur when a star, migrating close to a black hole, gets pulled apart from the black hole’s immense gravitational energy. This stellar obliteration can give off incredible bursts of energy all along the electromagnetic spectrum, from the radio band, through the optical and UV wavelengths, and on through the X-ray and high-energy gamma ray bands. As extreme as they are, tidal disruption flares are difficult to observe, as they happen infrequently.

“You’d have to stare at one galaxy for roughly 10,000 to 100,000 years to see a star getting disrupted by the black hole at the center,” Pasham says.

Nevertheless, on Nov. 11, 2014, a global network of robotic telescopes named ASASSN (All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae) picked up signals of a possible tidal disruption flare from a galaxy 300 million light years away. Scientists quickly focused other telescopes on the event, including the X-ray telescope aboard NASA’s Swift satellite, an orbiting spacecraft that scans the sky for bursts of extremely high energy.

“Only recently have telescopes started ‘talking’ to each other, and for this particular event we were lucky because a lot of people were ready for it,” Pasham says. “It just resulted in a lot of data.”

A light-on collision

With access to these data, Pasham and his colleagues wanted to solve a longstanding mystery: Where did a flare’s bursts of light first arise? Using models of black hole dynamics, scientists have been able to estimate that as a black hole rips a star apart, the resulting tidal disruption flare can produce X-ray emissions very close to the black hole. But it’s been difficult to pinpoint the origin of optical and UV emissions. Doing so would be an added step toward understanding what happens when a star gets disrupted.

"Supermassive black holes and their host galaxies grow in-situ,” Pasham says. “Knowing exactly what happens in tidal disruption flares could help us understand this black hole and galaxy coevolution process."

The researchers studied the first 270 days following the detection of the tidal disruption flare, named ASASSN-14li. In particular, they analyzed X-ray and optical/UV data taken by the Swift satellite and the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope. They identified fluctuations, or bursts, in the X-ray band — two broad peaks (one around day 50, and the other around day 110) followed by a short dip around day 80. They identified this very same pattern in the optical/UV data some 32 days earlier.

To explain these emission “echoes,” the team ran simulations of a tidal disruption flare produced from a black hole obliterating a star. The researchers modeled the resulting accretion disc — an elliptical disc of stellar debris swirling around the black hole — along with its probable speed, radius, and rate of infall, or speed at which material falls onto the black hole. From simulations run by others, the researchers conclude that the optical and UV bursts likely originated from the collision of stellar debris on the outer perimeter of the black hole. As this colliding material circles closer into the black hole, it heats up, eventually giving off X-ray emissions, which can lag behind the optical emissions, similar to what the scientists observed in the data.

“For supermassive black holes steadily accreting, you wouldn’t expect this choking to happen,” Pasham says. “The material around the black hole would be slowly rotating and losing some energy with each circular orbit. But that’s not what’s happening here. Because you have a lot of material falling onto the black hole, it’s interacting with itself, falling in again, and interacting again. If there are more events in the future, maybe we can see if this is what happens for other tidal disruption flares.” This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT/News

The heart of a far-off star beats for its planet

For the first time, astronomers have observed a star pulsing in response to its orbiting planet. The star, HAT-P-2, pictured, is one of the most massive exoplanets known today. The planet, named HAT-P-2b, tracks its star in a highly eccentric orbit, flying extremely close to and around the star, then hurtling far out before eventually circling back around. Image courtesy of NASA (edited by MIT News)

Scientists observe first planet-induced stellar pulsations.

For the first time, astronomers from MIT and elsewhere have observed a star pulsing in response to its orbiting planet.

The star, which goes by the name HAT-P-2, is about 400 light years from Earth and is circled by a gas giant measuring eight times the mass of Jupiter — one of the most massive exoplanets known today. The planet, named HAT-P-2b, tracks its star in a highly eccentric orbit, flying extremely close to and around the star, then hurtling far out before eventually circling back around.

The researchers analyzed more than 350 hours of observations of HAT-P-2 taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and found that the star’s brightness appears to oscillate ever so slightly every 87 minutes. In particular, the star seems to vibrate at exact harmonics, or multiples of the planet’s orbital frequency — the rate at which the planet circles its star.

The precisely timed pulsations have lead the researchers to believe that, contrary to most theoretical model-based predictions of exoplanetary behavior, HAT-P-2b may be massive enough to periodically distort its star, making the star’s molten surface flare, or pulse, in response.

“We thought that planets cannot really excite their stars, but we find that this one does,” says Julien de Wit, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “There is a physical link between the two, but at this stage, we actually can’t explain it. So these are mysterious pulsations induced by the star’s companion.”

De Wit is a the lead author of a paper detailing the results, published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Getting a pulse

The team came upon the stellar pulsations by chance. Originally, the researchers sought to generate a precise map of an exoplanet’s temperature distribution as it orbits its star. Such a map would help scientists track how energy is circulated through a planet’s atmosphere, which can give clues to an atmosphere’s wind patterns and composition.

With this goal in mind, the team viewed HAT-P-2 as an ideal system: Because the planet has an eccentric orbit, it seesaws between temperature extremes, turning

cold as it moves far away from its star, then rapidly heating as it swings extremely close.

“The star dumps an enormous amount of energy onto the planet’s atmosphere, and our original goal was to see how the planet’s atmosphere redistributes this energy,” de Wit says.

The researchers obtained 350 hours of observations of HAT-P-2, taken intermittently by Spitzer’s infrared telescope between July 2011 and November 2015. The dataset represents one of the largest ever taken by Spitzer, giving de Wit and his colleagues plenty of observations to allow for detecting the incredibly tiny signals required to map an exoplanet’s temperature distribution.

The team processed the data and focused on the window in which the planet made its closest approach, passing first in front of and then behind the star. During these periods, the researchers measured the star’s brightness to determine the amount of energy, in the form of heat, transferred to the planet.

Each time the planet passed behind the star, the researchers saw something unexpected: Instead of a flat line, representing a momentary drop as the planet is masked by its star, they observed tiny spikes — oscillations in the star’s light, with a period of about 90 minutes, that happened to be exact multiples of the planet’s orbital frequency.

“They were very tiny signals,” de Wit says. “It was like picking up the buzzing of a mosquito passing by a jet engine, both miles away.”

Lots of theories, one big mystery

Stellar pulsations can occur constantly as a star’s surface naturally boils and turns over. But the tiny pulsations detected by de Wit and his colleagues seem to be in concert with the planet’s orbit. The signals, they concluded, must not be due to anything in the star itself, but to either the circling planet or an effect in Spitzer’s instruments.

The researchers ruled out the latter after modeling all the possible instrumental effects, such as vibration, that could have affected the measurements, and finding that none of the effects could have produced the pulsations they observed.

“We think these pulsations must be induced by the planet, which is surprising,” de Wit says. “We’ve seen this in systems with two rotating stars that are supermassive, where one can really distort the other, release the distortion, and the other one vibrates. But we did not expect this to happen with a planet — even one as massive as this.”

“This is really exciting because, if our interpretations are correct, it tells us that planets can have a significant impact on physical phenomena operating in their host-stars,” says co-author Victoria Antoci, a postdoc at Aarhus University in Denmark. “In other words, the star ‘knows’ about its planet and reacts to its presence.”

The team has some theories as to how the planet might be causing its star to pulse. For example, perhaps the planet’s transient gravitational pull is disturbing the star just enough to tip it toward a self-pulsating phase. There are stars that naturally pulse, and perhaps HAT-P-2b is pushing its star toward that state, the way adding salt to a simmering pot of water can trigger it to boil over. De Wit says this is just one of several possibilities, but getting to the root of the stellar pulsations will require much more work.

“It’s a mystery, but it’s great, because it demonstrates our understanding of how a planet affects its star is not complete,” de Wit says. “So we’ll have to move forward and figure out what’s going on there.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech.

 Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

 Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT/news

Self-made stars

This composite image shows powerful radio jets from the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the Phoenix Cluster inflating huge "bubbles" in the hot, ionized gas surrounding the galaxy. The cavities inside the blue region were imaged by NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory. Hugging the outside of these bubbles, ALMA discovered an unexpected trove of cold gas, the fuel for star formation (red). The background image is from the Hubble Space Telescope.  Image: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) H.Russell, et al.; NASA/ESA Hubble; NASA/CXC/MIT/M.McDonald et al.; B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Astronomers observe black hole producing cold, star-making fuel from hot plasma jets and bubbles.

The Phoenix cluster is an enormous accumulation of about 1,000 galaxies, located 5.7 billion light years from Earth. At its center lies a massive galaxy, which appears to be spitting out stars at a rate of about 1,000 per year. Most other galaxies in the universe are far less productive, squeaking out just a few stars each year, and scientists have wondered what has fueled the Phoenix cluster’s extreme stellar output.

Now scientists from MIT, the University of Cambridge, and elsewhere may have an answer. In a paper published today in the Astrophysical Journal, the team reports observing jets of hot, 10-million-degree gas blasting out from the central galaxy’s black hole and blowing large bubbles out into the surrounding plasma.

These jets normally act to quench star formation by blowing away cold gas — the main fuel that a galaxy consumes to generate stars. However, the researchers found that the hot jets and bubbles emanating from the center of the Phoenix cluster may also have the opposite effect of producing cold gas, that in turn rains back onto the galaxy, fueling further starbursts. This suggests that the black hole has found a way to recycle some of its hot gas as cold, star-making fuel.

“We have thought the role of black hole jets and bubbles was to regulate star formation and to keep cooling from happening,” says Michael McDonald, assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “We kind of thought they were one-trick ponies, but now we see they can actually help cooling, and it’s not such a cut-and-dried picture.”

The new findings help to explain the Phoenix cluster’s exceptional star-producing power. They may also provide new insight into how supermassive black holes and their host galaxies mutually grow and evolve.

McDonald’s co-authors include lead author Helen Russell, an astronomer at Cambridge University; and others from the University of Waterloo, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the University of Illinois, and elsewhere.

Hot jets, cold filaments

The team analyzed observations of the Phoenix cluster gathered by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 large radio telescopes spread over the desert of northern Chile. In 2015, the group obtained permission to direct the telescopes at the Phoenix cluster to measure its radio emissions and to detect and map signs of cold gas.

The researchers looked through the data for signals of carbon monoxide, a gas that is present wherever there is cold hydrogen gas. They then converted the carbon monoxide emissions to hydrogen gas, to generate a map of cold gas near the center of the Phoenix cluster. The resulting picture was a puzzling surprise.

“You would expect to see a knot of cold gas at the center, where star formation happens,” McDonald says. “But we saw these giant filaments of cold gas that extend 20,000 light years from the central black hole, beyond the central galaxy itself. It’s kind of beautiful to see.”

The team had previously used NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory to map the cluster’s hot gas. These observations produced a picture in which powerful jets flew out from the black hole at close to the speed of light. Further out, the researchers saw that the jets inflated giant bubbles in the hot gas.

When the team superimposed its picture of the Phoenix cluster’s cold gas onto the map of hot gas, they found a “perfect spatial correspondence”: The long filaments of frigid, 10-kelvins gas appeared to be draped over the bubbles of hot gas.

“This may be the best picture we have of black holes influencing the cold gas,” McDonald says.

Feeding the black hole

What the researchers believe to be happening is that, as jet inflate bubbles of hot, 10-million-degree gas near the black hole, they drag behind them a wake of slightly cooler, 1-million-degree gas. The bubbles eventually detach from the jets and float further out into the galaxy cluster, where each bubble’s trail of gas cools, forming long filaments of extremely cold gas that condense and rain back onto the black hole as fuel for star formation.

“It’s a very new idea that the bubbles and jets can actually influence the distribution of cold gas in any way,” McDonald says.

Scientists have estimated that there is enough cold gas near the center of the Phoenix cluster to keep producing stars at a high rate for another 30 to 40 million years. Now that the researchers have identified a new feedback mechanism that may supply the black hole with even more cold gas, the cluster’s stellar output may continue for much longer.

“As long as there’s cold gas feeding it, the black hole will keep burping out these jets,” McDonald says. “But now we’ve found that these jets are making more food, or cold gas. So you’re in this cycle that, in theory, could go on for a very long time.”

He suspects the reason the black hole is able to generate fuel for itself might have something to do with its size. If the black hole is relatively small, it may produce jets that are too weak to completely blast cold gas away from the cluster.

“Right now [the black hole] may be pretty small, and it’d be like putting a civilian in the ring with Mike Tyson,” McDonald says. “It’s just not up to the task of blowing this cold gas far enough away that it would never come back.”

The team is hoping to determine the mass of the black hole, as well as identify other, similarly extreme starmakers in the universe.

 Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

 Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT/news

Scientists estimate solar nebula’s lifetime

By studying the magnetic orientations in ancient meteorites, an MIT team has determined that the solar nebula — the vast of disc of gas and dust that ultimately gave rise to the solar system — lasted around 3 to 4 million years. Image: NASA/JHUAPL

Study finds the swirling gas disk disappeared within the solar system’s first 4 million years

About 4.6 billion years ago, an enormous cloud of hydrogen gas and dust collapsed under its own weight, eventually flattening into a disk called the solar nebula. Most of this interstellar material contracted at the disk’s center to form the sun, and part of the solar nebula’s remaining gas and dust condensed to form the planets and the rest of our solar system.

Now scientists from MIT and their colleagues have estimated the lifetime of the solar nebula — a key stage during which much of the solar system evolution took shape.

This new estimate suggests that the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn must have formed within the first 4 million years of the solar system’s formation. Furthermore, they must have completed gas-driven migration of their orbital positions by this time.

“So much happens right at the beginning of the solar system’s history,” says Benjamin Weiss, professor of earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences at MIT. “Of course the planets evolve after that, but the large-scale structure of the solar system was essentially established in the first 4 million years.”

Weiss and MIT postdoc Huapei Wang, the first author of this study, report their results today in the journal Science. Their co-authors are Brynna Downey, Clement Suavet, and Roger Fu from MIT; Xue-Ning Bai of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Jun Wang and Jiajun Wang of Brookhaven National Laboratory; and Maria Zucolotto of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

Spectacular recorders

By studying the magnetic orientations in pristine samples of ancient meteorites that formed 4.653 billion years ago, the team determined that the solar nebula lasted around 3 to 4 million years. This is a more precise figure than previous estimates, which placed the solar nebula’s lifetime at somewhere between 1 and 10 million years.

The team came to its conclusion after carefully analyzing angrites, which are some of the oldest and most pristine of planetary rocks. Angrites are igneous rocks, many of which are thought to have erupted onto the surface of asteroids very early in the solar system’s history and then quickly cooled, freezing their original properties — including their composition and paleomagnetic signals — in place.

Scientists view angrites as exceptional recorders of the early solar system, particularly as the rocks also contain high amounts of uranium, which they can use to precisely determine their age.

“Angrites are really spectacular,” Weiss says. “Many of them look like what might be erupting on Hawaii, but they cooled on a very early planetesimal.”

Weiss and his colleagues analyzed four angrites that fell to Earth at different places and times.

“One fell in Argentina, and was discovered when a farm worker was tilling his field,” Weiss says. “It looked like an Indian artifact or bowl, and the landowner kept it by this house for about 20 years, until he finally decided to have it analyzed, and it turned out to be a really rare meteorite.”

The other three meteorites were discovered in Brazil, Antarctica, and the Sahara Desert. All four meteorites were remarkably well-preserved, having undergone no additional heating or major compositional changes since they originally formed.

Measuring tiny compasses

The team obtained samples from all four meteorites. By measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in each sample, previous studies had determined that the three oldest formed around 4.653 billion years ago. The researchers then measured the rocks’ remnant magnetization using a precision magnetometer in the MIT Paleomagnetism Laboratory.

“Electrons are little compass needles, and if you align a bunch of them in a rock, the rock becomes magnetized,” Weiss explains. “Once they’re aligned, which can happen when a rock cools in the presence of a magnetic field, then they stay that way. That’s what we use as records of ancient magnetic fields.”

When they placed the angrites in the magnetometer, the researchers observed very little remnant magnetization, indicating there was very little magnetic field present when the angrites formed.

The team went a step further and tried to reconstruct the magnetic field that would have produced the rocks’ alignments, or lack thereof. To do so, they heated the samples up, then cooled them down again in a laboratory-controlled magnetic field.

“We can keep lowering the lab field and can reproduce what’s in the sample,” Weiss says. “We find only very weak lab fields are allowed, given how little remnant magnetization is in these three angrites.”

Specifically, the team found that the angrites’ remnant magnetization could have been produced by an extremely weak magnetic field of no more than 0.6 microteslas, 4.653 billion years ago, or, about 4 million years after the start of the solar system.

In 2014, Weiss’ group analyzed other ancient meteorites that formed within the solar system’s first 2 to 3 million years, and found evidence of a magnetic field that was about 10-100 times stronger — about 5-50 microtesla.

“It’s predicted that once the magnetic field drops by a factor of 10-100 in the inner solar system, which we’ve now shown, the solar nebula goes away really quickly, within 100,000 years,” Weiss says. “So even if the solar nebula hadn’t disappeared by 4 million years, it was basically on its way out.”

The planets align

The researchers’ new estimate is much more precise than previous estimates, which were based on observations of faraway stars.

“What’s more, the angrites’ paleomagnetism constrains the lifetime of our own solar nebula, while astronomical observations obviously measure other faraway solar systems,” Wang adds. “Since the solar nebula lifetime critically affects the final positions of Jupiter and Saturn, it also affects the later formation of the Earth, our home, as well as the formation of other terrestrial planets.”

Now that the scientists have a better idea of how long the solar nebula persisted, they can also narrow in on how giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn formed. Giant planets are mostly made of gas and ice, and there are two prevailing hypotheses for how all this material came together as a planet. One suggests that giant planets formed from the gravitational collapse of condensing gas, like the sun did. The other suggests they arose in a two-stage process called core accretion, in which bits of material smashed and fused together to form bigger rocky, icy bodies. Once these bodies were massive enough, they could have created a gravitational force that attracted huge amounts of gas to ultimately form a giant planet.

According to previous predictions, giant planets that form through gravitational collapse of gas should complete their general formation within 100,000 years. Core accretion, in contrast, is typically thought to take much longer, on the order of 1 to several million years. Weiss says that if the solar nebula was around in the first 4 million years of solar system formation, this would give support to the core accretion scenario, which is generally favored among scientists.

“The gas giants must have formed by 4 million years after the formation of the solar system,” Weiss says. “Planets were moving all over the place, in and out over large distances, and all this motion is thought to have been driven by gravitational forces from the gas. We’re saying all this happened in the first 4 million years.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA and a generous gift from Thomas J. Peterson, Jr.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

Source: MIT/News