&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Invisible murderer in space reveals its location with a 'cosmic burp'. It is an anomaly")
A wandering supermassive black hole is inflicting terror on passing stars, creating a horror scene in space. Located 600 million light-years away, this monster cosmic body is invisible and quietly devouring stars. Hubble Space Telescope spotted it, marking the first optical discovery of a supermassive black hole that is roaming around in space. Dubbed "Space Jaws" by astronomers, the black hole isn't strangely sitting at the centre of a galaxy, like they usually do. It is so humongous that it can fit one million suns. But it is a cosmic anomaly, and scientists are trying to learn more about it.
A newly identified tidal disruption event (TDE) exposed the killer black hole sitting between stars. The event showed that a black hole had torn apart and devoured a star, releasing a powerful burst of radiation. TDEs help scientists understand how black holes operate, offering an insight into what triggers energetic jets and winds when a star is shredded. This TDE is named AT2024tvd and appeared like a bright flash picked up by Hubble. Notably, black holes have immense gravitational tidal forces. A TDE occurs when a falling star is stretched or "spaghettified" by this force.
Rogue black hole is roaming in the galaxy
Supermassive black holes are almost always situated at the centre of a galaxy. But this one is wandering and off-centre. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the NRAO’s Very Large Array also confirmed that the black hole is located away from the galaxy’s centre. The observation of the strange supermassive black hole was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“AT2024tvd is the first offset TDE captured by optical sky surveys, and it opens up the entire possibility of uncovering this elusive population of wandering black holes with future sky surveys,” said lead study author Yuhan Yao of the University of California at Berkeley.
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Scientists say that in roughly 100 tidal disruption events (TDEs) detected by telescopes, this is the first time a black hole of this size was seen positioned away from a galaxy’s core. All other known TDEs have been tied to central black holes. What' scary is that the galaxy has another supermassive black hole that sits in its usual location - at the centre. It has a mass of 100 million suns and is only about 2,600 light-years from the other black hole that seems to have gone rogue.
Invisible black hole released a cosmic burp, revealing its location
The supermassive black hole is invisible. But when several ground-based sky survey telescopes noticed a bright flare, scientists knew it was not from a supernova. The flare was very hot, which revealed that the flash was from a black hole eating a star. It doesn't show itself a lot, but only once every few tens of thousands of years when it "burps" after feeding on a star. Experts think that the black hole went off-centre because of the three-body problem, where the lowest-mass member is kicked out. If the black hole went through a triple interaction with two other black holes in the galaxy’s core, it can still remain bound to the galaxy, orbiting around the central region,“ said Yao.
What is the black hole's future? It might be gradually pulled by the bigger black hole at the centre and merge with it. But we might never know its fate since such cosmic events take millions of years.
