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Swiftly Moving Gas Streamer Eclipses Supermassive Black Hole
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By NASA
This illustration shows a red, early-universe dwarf galaxy that hosts a rapidly feeding black hole at its center. Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers have discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy just 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. It is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva/M. Zamani A rapidly feeding black hole at the center of a dwarf galaxy in the early universe, shown in this artist’s concept, may hold important clues to the evolution of supermassive black holes in general.
Using data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory, a team of astronomers discovered this low-mass supermassive black hole just 1.5 billion years after the big bang. The black hole is pulling in matter at a phenomenal rate — over 40 times the theoretical limit. While short lived, this black hole’s “feast” could help astronomers explain how supermassive black holes grew so quickly in the early universe.
Supermassive black holes exist at the center of most galaxies, and modern telescopes continue to observe them at surprisingly early times in the universe’s evolution. It’s difficult to understand how these black holes were able to grow so big so rapidly. But with the discovery of a low-mass supermassive black hole feasting on material at an extreme rate so soon after the birth of the universe, astronomers now have valuable new insights into the mechanisms of rapidly growing black holes in the early universe.
The black hole, called LID-568, was hidden among thousands of objects in the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s COSMOS legacy survey, a catalog resulting from some 4.6 million Chandra observations. This population of galaxies is very bright in the X-ray light, but invisible in optical and previous near-infrared observations. By following up with Webb, astronomers could use the observatory’s unique infrared sensitivity to detect these faint counterpart emissions, which led to the discovery of the black hole.
The speed and size of these outflows led the team to infer that a substantial fraction of the mass growth of LID-568 may have occurred in a single episode of rapid accretion.
LID-568 appears to be feeding on matter at a rate 40 times its Eddington limit. This limit relates to the maximum amount of light that material surrounding a black hole can emit, as well as how fast it can absorb matter, such that its inward gravitational force and outward pressure generated from the heat of the compressed, infalling matter remain in balance.
These results provide new insights into the formation of supermassive black holes from smaller black hole “seeds,” which current theories suggest arise either from the death of the universe’s first stars (light seeds) or the direct collapse of gas clouds (heavy seeds). Until now, these theories lacked observational confirmation.
The new discovery suggests that “a significant portion of mass growth can occur during a single episode of rapid feeding, regardless of whether the black hole originated from a light or heavy seed,” said International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab astronomer Hyewon Suh, who led the research team.
A paper describing these results (“A super-Eddington-accreting black hole ~1.5 Gyr after the Big Bang observed with JWST”) appears in the journal Nature Astronomy.
About the Missions
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and CSA (Canadian Space Agency).
Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
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By NASA
4 min read
NASA’s Swift Studies Gas-Churning Monster Black Holes
A pair of monster black holes swirl in a cloud of gas in this artist’s concept of AT 2021hdr, a recurring outburst studied by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and the Zwicky Transient Facility at Palomar Observatory in California. NASA/Aurore Simonnet (Sonoma State University) Scientists using observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of a galaxy.
“It’s a very weird event, called AT 2021hdr, that keeps recurring every few months,” said Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, the Millennium Nucleus on Transversal Research and Technology to Explore Supermassive Black Holes, and University of Valparaíso in Chile. “We think that a gas cloud engulfed the black holes. As they orbit each other, the black holes interact with the cloud, perturbing and consuming its gas. This produces an oscillating pattern in the light from the system.”
A paper about AT 2021hdr, led by Hernández-García, was published Nov. 13 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The dual black holes are in the center of a galaxy called 2MASX J21240027+3409114, located 1 billion light-years away in the northern constellation Cygnus. The pair are about 16 billion miles (26 billion kilometers) apart, close enough that light only takes a day to travel between them. Together they contain 40 million times the Sun’s mass.
Scientists estimate the black holes complete an orbit every 130 days and will collide and merge in approximately 70,000 years.
AT 2021hdr was first spotted in March 2021 by the Caltech-led ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was flagged as a potentially interesting source by ALeRCE (Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events). This multidisciplinary team combines artificial intelligence tools with human expertise to report events in the night sky to the astronomical community using the mountains of data collected by survey programs like ZTF.
“Although this flare was originally thought to be a supernova, outbursts in 2022 made us think of other explanations,” said co-author Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia, an ALeRCE team member and astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile. “Each subsequent event has helped us refine our model of what’s going on in the system.”
Since the first flare, ZTF has detected outbursts from AT 2021hdr every 60 to 90 days.
Hernández-García and her team have been observing the source with Swift since November 2022. Swift helped them determine that the binary produces oscillations in ultraviolet and X-ray light on the same time scales as ZTF sees them in the visible range.
The researchers conducted a Goldilocks-type elimination of different models to explain what they saw in the data.
Initially, they thought the signal could be the byproduct of normal activity in the galactic center. Then they considered whether a tidal disruption event — the destruction of a star that wandered too close to one of the black holes — could be the cause.
Finally, they settled on another possibility, the tidal disruption of a gas cloud, one that was bigger than the binary itself. When the cloud encountered the black holes, gravity ripped it apart, forming filaments around the pair, and friction started to heat it. The gas got particularly dense and hot close to the black holes. As the binary orbits, the complex interplay of forces ejects some of the gas from the system on each rotation. These interactions produce the fluctuating light Swift and ZTF observe.
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Watch as a gas cloud encounters two supermassive black holes in this simulation. The complex interplay of gravitational and frictional forces causes the cloud to condense and heat. Some of the gas is ejected from the system with each orbit of the black holes. F. Goicovic et al. 2016 Hernández-García and her team plan to continue observations of AT 2021hdr to better understand the system and improve their models. They’re also interested in studying its home galaxy, which is currently merging with another one nearby — an event first reported in their paper.
“As Swift approaches its 20th anniversary, it’s incredible to see all the new science it’s still helping the community accomplish,” said S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There’s still so much it has left to teach us about our ever-changing cosmos.”
NASA’s missions are part of a growing, worldwide network watching for changes in the sky to solve mysteries of how the universe works.
Goddard manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.
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By Jeanette Kazmierczak
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media Contact:
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NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Nov 13, 2024 Editor Jeanette Kazmierczak Related Terms
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Healing continues in the atmosphere over the Antarctic: a hole that opens annually in the ozone layer over Earth’s southern pole was relatively small in 2024 compared to other years. Scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project the ozone layer could fully recover by 2066.
This map shows the size and shape of the ozone hole over the South Pole on Sept. 28, 2024, the day of its annual maximum extent, as calculated by the NASA Ozone Watch team. Scientists describe the ozone “hole” as the area in which ozone concentrations drop below the historical threshold of 220 Dobson units. During the peak of ozone depletion season from Sept. 7 through Oct. 13, the 2024 area of the ozone hole ranked the seventh smallest since recovery began in 1992, when the Montreal Protocol, a landmark international agreement to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals, began to take effect.
At almost 8 million square miles (20 million square kilometers), the monthly average ozone-depleted region in the Antarctic this year was nearly three times the size of the contiguous U.S. The hole reached its greatest one-day extent for the year on Sept. 28 at 8.5 million square miles (22.4 million square kilometers).
The improvement is due to a combination of continuing declines in harmful chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) chemicals, along with an unexpected infusion of ozone carried by air currents from north of the Antarctic, scientists said.
The ozone hole over Antarctica reached its annual maximum extent on Sept. 28, 2024, with an area of 8.5 million square miles (22.4 million square kilometers).
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ Kathleen Gaeta In previous years, NASA and NOAA have reported the ozone hole ranking using a time frame dating back to 1979, when scientists began tracking Antarctic ozone levels with satellite data. Using that longer record, this year’s hole ranked 20th smallest in area across the 45 years of observations.
“The 2024 Antarctic hole is smaller than ozone holes seen in the early 2000s,” said Paul Newman, leader of NASA’s ozone research team and chief scientist for Earth sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The gradual improvement we’ve seen in the past two decades shows that international efforts that curbed ozone-destroying chemicals are working.”
The ozone-rich layer high in the atmosphere acts as a planetary sunscreen that helps shield us from harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the Sun. Areas with depleted ozone allow more UV radiation, resulting in increased cases of skin cancer and cataracts. Excessive exposure to UV light can also reduce agricultural yields as well as damage aquatic plants and animals in vital ecosystems.
Scientists were alarmed in the 1970s at the prospect that CFCs could eat away at atmospheric ozone. By the mid-1980s, the ozone layer had been depleted so much that a broad swath of the Antarctic stratosphere was essentially devoid of ozone by early October each year. Sources of damaging CFCs included coolants in refrigerators and air conditioners, as well as aerosols in hairspray, antiperspirant, and spray paint. Harmful chemicals were also released in the manufacture of insulating foams and as components of industrial fire suppression systems.
The Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987 to phase out CFC-based products and processes. Countries worldwide agreed to replace the chemicals with more environmentally friendly alternatives by 2010. The release of CFC compounds has dramatically decreased following the Montreal Protocol. But CFCs already in the air will take many decades to break down. As existing CFC levels gradually decline, ozone in the upper atmosphere will rebound globally, and ozone holes will shrink.
Ozone 101 is the first in a series of explainer videos outlining the fundamentals of popular Earth science topics. Let’s back up to the basics and understand what caused the Ozone Hole, its effects on the planet, and what scientists predict will happen in future decades.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/ Kathleen Gaeta “For 2024, we can see that the ozone hole’s severity is below average compared to other years in the past three decades, but the ozone layer is still far from being fully healed,” said Stephen Montzka, senior scientist of the NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory.
Researchers rely on a combination of systems to monitor the ozone layer. They include instruments on NASA’s Aura satellite, the NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 satellites, and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, jointly operated by NASA and NOAA.
NOAA scientists also release instrumented weather balloons from the South Pole Baseline Atmospheric Observatory to observe ozone concentrations directly overhead in a measurement called Dobson Units. The 2024 concentration reached its lowest value of 109 Dobson Units on October 5. The lowest value ever recorded over the South Pole was 92 Dobson Units in October 2006.
NASA and NOAA satellite observations of ozone concentrations cover the entire ozone hole, which can produce a slightly smaller value for the lowest Dobson Unit measurement.
“That is well below the 225 Dobson Units that was typical of the ozone cover above the Antarctic in 1979,” said NOAA research chemist Bryan Johnson. “So, there’s still a long way to go before atmospheric ozone is back to the levels before the advent of widespread CFC pollution.”
View the latest status of the ozone layer over the Antarctic with NASA’s ozone watch.
By James Riordon
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
Media Contact:
Jacob Richmond
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
jacob.richmond@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Oct 30, 2024 LocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
5 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
New findings using data from NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) mission offer unprecedented insight into the shape and nature of a structure important to black holes called a corona.
A corona is a shifting plasma region that is part of the flow of matter onto a black hole, about which scientists have only a theoretical understanding. The new results reveal the corona’s shape for the first time, and may aid scientists’ understanding of the corona’s role in feeding and sustaining black holes.
This illustration of material swirling around a black hole highlights a particular feature, called the “corona,” that shines brightly in X-ray light. In this depiction, the corona can be seen as a purple haze floating above the underlying accretion disk, and extending slightly inside of its inner edge. The material within the inner accretion disk is incredibly hot and would glow with a blinding blue-white light, but here has been reduced in brightness to make the corona stand out with better contrast. Its purple color is purely illustrative, standing in for the X-ray glow that would not be obvious in visible light. The warp in the disk is a realistic representation of how the black hole’s immense gravity acts like an optical lens, distorting our view of the flat disk that encircles it. NASA/Caltech-IPAC/Robert Hurt Many black holes, so named because not even light can escape their titanic gravity, are surrounded by accretion disks, debris-cluttered whirlpools of gas. Some black holes also have relativistic jets – ultra-powerful outbursts of matter hurled into space at high speed by black holes that are actively eating material in their surroundings.
Less well known, perhaps, is that snacking black holes, much like Earth’s Sun and other stars, also possess a superheated corona. While the Sun’s corona, which is the star’s outermost atmosphere, burns at roughly 1.8 million degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of a black hole corona is estimated at billions of degrees.
Astrophysicists previously identified coronae among stellar-mass black holes – those formed by a star’s collapse – and supermassive black holes such as the one at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy.
“Scientists have long speculated on the makeup and geometry of the corona,” said Lynne Saade, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and lead author of the new findings. “Is it a sphere above and below the black hole, or an atmosphere generated by the accretion disk, or perhaps plasma located at the base of the jets?”
Enter IXPE, which specializes in X-ray polarization, the characteristic of light that helps map the shape and structure of even the most powerful energy sources, illuminating their inner workings even when the objects are too small, bright, or distant to see directly. Just as we can safely observe the Sun’s corona during a total solar eclipse, IXPE provides the means to clearly study the black hole’s accretion geometry, or the shape and structure of its accretion disk and related structures, including the corona.
“X-ray polarization provides a new way to examine black hole accretion geometry,” Saade said. “If the accretion geometry of black holes is similar regardless of mass, we expect the same to be true of their polarization properties.”
IXPE demonstrated that, among all black holes for which coronal properties could be directly measured via polarization, the corona was found to be extended in the same direction as the accretion disk – providing, for the first time, clues to the corona’s shape and clear evidence of its relationship to the accretion disk. The results rule out the possibility that the corona is shaped like a lamppost hovering over the disk.
The research team studied data from IXPE’s observations of 12 black holes, among them Cygnus X-1 and Cygnus X-3, stellar-mass binary black hole systems about 7,000 and 37,000 light-years from Earth, respectively, and LMC X-1 and LMC X-3, stellar-mass black holes in the Large Magellanic Cloud more than 165,000 light-years away. IXPE also observed a number of supermassive black holes, including the one at the center of the Circinus galaxy, 13 million light-years from Earth, and those in galaxies NGC 1068 and NGC 4151, 47 million light-years away and nearly 62 million light-years away, respectively.
Stellar mass black holes typically have a mass roughly 10 to 30 times that of Earth’s Sun, whereas supermassive black holes may have a mass that is millions to tens of billions of times larger. Despite these vast differences in scale, IXPE data suggests both types of black holes create accretion disks of similar geometry.
That’s surprising, said Marshall astrophysicist Philip Kaaret, principal investigator for the IXPE mission, because the way the two types are fed is completely different.
“Stellar-mass black holes rip mass from their companion stars, whereas supermassive black holes devour everything around them,” he said. “Yet the accretion mechanism functions much the same way.”
That’s an exciting prospect, Saade said, because it suggests that studies of stellar-mass black holes – typically much closer to Earth than their much more massive cousins – can help shed new light on properties of supermassive black holes as well.
The team next hopes to make additional examinations of both types.
Saade anticipates there’s much more to glean from X-ray studies of these behemoths. “IXPE has provided the first opportunity in a long time for X-ray astronomy to reveal the underlying processes of accretion and unlock new findings about black holes,” she said.
The complete findings are available in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
More about IXPE
IXPE, which continues to provide unprecedented data enabling groundbreaking discoveries about celestial objects across the universe, is a joint NASA and Italian Space Agency mission with partners and science collaborators in 12 countries. IXPE is led by Marshall. Ball Aerospace, headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, manages spacecraft operations together with the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics in Boulder.
Learn more about IXPE’s ongoing mission here:
https://www.nasa.gov/ixpe
Elizabeth Landau
NASA Headquarters
elizabeth.r.landau@nasa.gov
202-358-0845
Lane Figueroa
NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
256-544-0034
lane.e.figueroa@nasa.gov
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Last Updated Oct 17, 2024 EditorBeth RidgewayLocationMarshall Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
4 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
On Sept. 19, the imaging spectrometer on the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite detected this methane plume in Karachi, Pakistan, extending nearly 2½ miles (4 kilometers) from a landfill. The spectrometer was designed at NASA JPL.Carbon Mapper/Planet Labs PBC Extending about 2 miles (3 kilometers) from a coal-fired power plant, this carbon dioxide plume in Kendal, South Africa, was captured Sept. 19 by the imaging spectrometer on the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite.Carbon Mapper/Planet Labs PBC This methane plume was captured south of Midland, Texas, in the Permian Basin, one of the world’s largest oil fields. The imaging spectrometer on the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite made the detection on Sept. 24.Carbon Mapper/Planet Labs PBC The imaging spectrometer aboard the Carbon Mapper Coalition’s Tanager-1 satellite identified methane and carbon dioxide plumes in the United States and internationally.
Using data from an instrument designed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the nonprofit Carbon Mapper has released the first methane and carbon dioxide detections from the Tanager-1 satellite. The detections highlight methane plumes in Pakistan and Texas, as well as a carbon dioxide plume in South Africa.
The data contributes to Carbon Mapper’s goal to identify and measure greenhouse gas point-source emissions on a global scale and make that information accessible and actionable.
Enabled by Carbon Mapper and built by Planet Labs PBC, Tanager-1 launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Aug. 16 and has been collecting data to verify that its imaging spectrometer, which is based on technology developed at NASA JPL, is functioning properly. Both Planet Labs PBC and JPL are members of the philanthropically funded Carbon Mapper Coalition.
“The first greenhouse gas images from Tanager-1 are exciting and are a compelling sign of things to come,” said James Graf, director for Earth Science and Technology at JPL. “The satellite plays a crucial role in detecting and measuring methane and carbon dioxide emissions. The mission is a giant step forward in addressing greenhouse gas emissions.”
The data used to produce the Pakistan image was collected over the city of Karachi on Sept. 19 and shows a roughly 2.5-mile-long (4-kilometer-long) methane plume emanating from a landfill. Carbon Mapper’s preliminary estimate of the source emissions rate is more than 2,600 pounds (1,200 kilograms) of methane released per hour.
The image collected that same day over Kendal, South Africa, displays a nearly 2-mile-long (3-kilometer-long) carbon dioxide plume coming from a coal-fired power plant. Carbon Mapper’s preliminary estimate of the source emissions rate is roughly 1.3 million pounds (600,000 kilograms) of carbon dioxide per hour.
The Texas image, collected on Sept. 24, reveals a methane plume to the south of the city of Midland, in the Permian Basin, one of the largest oilfields in the world. Carbon Mapper’s preliminary estimate of the source emissions rate is nearly 900 pounds (400 kilograms) of methane per hour.
In the 1980s, JPL helped pioneer the development of imaging spectrometers with AVIRIS (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer), and in 2022, NASA installed the imaging spectrometer EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation), developed at JPL, aboard the International Space Station.
A descendant of those instruments, the imaging spectrometer aboard Tanager-1 can measure hundreds of wavelengths of light reflected from Earth’s surface. Each chemical compound on the ground and in the atmosphere reflects and absorbs different combinations of wavelengths, which give it a “spectral fingerprint” that researchers can identify. Using this approach, Tanager-1 will help researchers detect and measure emissions down to the facility level.
Once in full operation, the spacecraft will scan about 116,000 square miles (300,000 square kilometers) of Earth’s surface per day. Methane and carbon dioxide measurements collected by Tanager-1 will be publicly available on the Carbon Mapper data portal.
More About Carbon Mapper
Carbon Mapper is a nonprofit organization focused on facilitating timely action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Its mission is to fill gaps in the emerging global ecosystem of methane and carbon dioxide monitoring systems by delivering data at facility scale that is precise, timely, and accessible to empower science-based decision making and action. The organization is leading the development of the Carbon Mapper constellation of satellites supported by a public-private partnership composed of Planet Labs PBC, JPL, the California Air Resources Board, Arizona State University, and RMI, with funding from High Tide Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and other philanthropic donors.
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