By Ben Turner published 2 days ago
A strange blob has been seen rapidly circling our galaxy's central black hole. Now, astronomers have identified it as the exploded debris from two merging stars.
An image of the distant blob, X7, circling our Milky Way's supermassive black hole. (Image credit: Anna Ciurlo/UCLA)
A mysterious object that has been slowly drifting toward the center of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole could be the exploded remnants of two colliding stars, a new study suggests.
The strange blob, named X7, has a mass of around 50 Earths and is moving at speeds of up to 700 mph (1,125 km/h) as it spirals into our galaxy's central black hole, getting yanked and stretched by powerful tidal forces as it falls.
Now, by analyzing 20 years of observational data, astrophysicists finally have a theory for what the blob is: a cloud of ejected debris from a head-on collision between two merging stars. They published their findings Feb. 21 in The Astrophysical Journal.
"No other object in this region has shown such an extreme evolution," lead author Anna Ciurlo, an assistant researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a statement. "It started off comet-shaped and people thought maybe it got that shape from stellar winds or jets of particles from the black hole. But as we followed it for 20 years we saw it becoming more elongated. Something must have put this cloud on its particular path with its particular orientation."
More:
https://www.livescience.com/a-mysterious-object-is-being-sucked-into-our-galaxys-black-hole-now-we-may-know-what-it-is
Edit history
Recommendations
0 members have recommended this reply (displayed in chronological order):
= new reply since forum marked as read