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ESA finds a black-hole flywheel in the Milky Way
April 26, 2002Far away among the stars, in the Ara constellation of the southern sky, a small black hole is whirling space around it. If you tried to stay still in its vicinity, you couldn`t. You`d be dragged around at high speed as if you were riding on a giant flywheel.
In reality, gas falling into the black hole is whirled in that way. It radiates energy, in the form of X-rays, more intensely than it would do if space were still by tapping into the black hole`s internal energy stream.
ESA`s big X-ray detecting satellite, XMM-Newton, was specifically designed to detect this form of energy.
With this finding it has chalked up another notable success in its investigations of the black holes - mysterious regions of space where gravity is so strong that light can`t escape. High speeds and intense gravity affect the energy of X-rays emitted from iron atoms very close to a black hole. By detecting the resulting spread of energies, with XMM-Newton, astronomers can diagnose the conditions there.
The weird effect of a spinning black hole on its surroundings is linked to Albert Einstein`s theory of gravity, in which the fabric of space itself becomes fluid. XMM-Newton first discovered such black-hole flywheels in galaxies many millions of light-years away. Now, in findings to be formally reported next month, it sees the same thing much closer to home, in our own Galaxy, the Milky Way.
A US-European team of astronomers made the discovery last September, during an outburst from the vicinity of a black-hole candidate called XTE J1650-500. This object is about 10 times heavier than the Sun. A similar black-hole flywheel in another galaxy, already examined by XMM-Newton, is a million times more massive than that, and 4000 times more distant.
"Now we`ve seen this astonishing behaviour across a great range of distances and masses," comments Matthias Ehle, a member of the team at ESA`s Villafranca satellite station in Spain. "Our hopes that XMM-Newton would vastly improve our understanding of black holes have not been disappointed."
The astronomers describe their observations and their interpretations in a paper to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, 10 May 2002. The lead author is Jon Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
European Space Agency (ESA)
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