[Science] Wonky black hole spotted rapidly eating a doughnut made from a star – AI

This black hole is feeding on a “doughnut” made from a starICAR By Ruby Prosser ScullyAstronomers have spotted a wonky black hole shooting jets of plasma clouds in different directions as a result of rapidly consuming a star. While black holes are known for sucking in everything, including light, many also emit powerful jets of plasma as a result of matter being accelerated by the black hole’s extreme gravity. These jets normally burst straight out from the black hole’s poles, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in V404 Cygni, a binary system consisting of a black hole and a star. Advertisement Using a series of telescopes based across the US, from Hawaii to the Virgin Islands, James Miller-Jones from Curtin University, Australia and his colleagues studied a two-week long outburst of jets and radiation coming from the system in 2015. Read more: First ever real image of a black hole revealed “The remarkable thing was that the jet direction was changing on a very, very short time scale,” Miller-Jones said in a press briefing –  on time scales of ten minutes or less. While astronomers have seen the direction of jets changing before in a handful of other systems, this was over much longer timespans, he said. The black hole, which is 7800 light years from Earth, is sucking the gas off the surface of its companion star. The black hole is siphoning material from an orbiting starICAR “It swirls around the black hole, much like water swirls around a plughole as it’s on its way down,” said Miller-Jones. This forms an accretion disc of matter around the black hole. Such discs are usually thin and flat, like a CD, but in V404 Cygni the black hole is feeding so rapidly that the inner few thousand kilometres look more like a doughnut. Miller-Jones said the most likely explanation is that the black hole’s rapid feeding emitted radiation that caused the inner part of the accretion disc to puff up. This results in a misalignment between the disc and black hole, pushing the jets in different directions. “That puffed up bit was wobbling, a bit like a spinning top as it slows down,” Miller-Jones said. This shows how the movement of gas that is only a few thousand kilometres wide can be responsible for directing the jets that then travel out distances a million times larger – as big as our entire solar system, he said. “We actually suspect that a majority of black holes may well have a misalignment like this, but we don’t think that this would lead the jets to wobble unless they start feeding very rapidly,” he said. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1152-0 More on these topics: black holes