July 4, 2022 –
An international team of astrophysicists has identified the location where powerful, highly energetic X-rays are being fired into space from inside a space region in the shape of a giant aquatic mammal called a “manatee.” They found that the spectrum of the object at this location shows that there is a “non-classical acceleration process” where particles are injected and accelerated again into immensely powerful jets of energy emitted by a black hole. But don’t worry about it radiating to us, as it’s more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles from us.
Samar Safi-Harb
It has long been known that the astronomical object known as SS 433 harbors a black hole that is causing energy explosions across the Milky Way through jets of highly energetic particles. Considered the first known microquasar, it is located in the center of what remains of an exploded star in the constellation of Aquila, at the top of the summer night sky.
“This fascinating system looks like a beautiful manatee in space and represents the only known supernova remnant in our galaxy (of about 400 such objects) that houses a black hole,” says the UM astrophysicist. , Dr. in Extreme Astrophysics and lead author of the article which includes scientists from Canada, USA, Europe and South Korea.
British Mac Intyre
Brydyn Mac Intyre, a member of the UM team and an undergraduate student, helped create a stunning color image of this extraordinary astronomical object. Energy bursts end in two bright “ear lobes” at radio wavelengths, cut by jets that traverse space at a quarter of the speed of light. “Space along the path of the jets glows brightly in X-ray light and high-energy range is light decades away from the black hole, but it’s not visible to the naked eye,” says Mac Intyre.
SS 433 is so powerful that astrophysicists have been looking for high-energy gamma-ray radiation in the area. In the late 1990s, Safi-Harb proposed that this system accelerates particles to higher energies than can be achieved in the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth. It took about 20 years to detect high-energy gamma radiation; in 2018, researchers at the Cherenkov High Altitude Water Observatory announced the discovery of high-energy TeV (Tera-electron-volt) gamma rays from the system. However, the location of the particle acceleration has not been identified so far.
Kaya Mori
Using the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton satellite and NASA’s NuSTAR satellite, modern orbiting X-ray telescopes, combined with data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope, this team d researchers were able to identify the location of the “hardest” (or highest energy) X-ray emitting region near SS 433, which is believed to have been the start of large-scale eastern emission.
Dr. Kaya Mori, a collaborator and astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, says that this powerful source of energy, which is now believed to accelerate particles to very high energies, is a strong candidate for a “PeVatron “cosmic, a source that is accelerating cosmic rays. to petaelectron volt energies, or 1,000,000,000,000,000 volts!
“Given the unusual nature of the spectrum and the location of the source, this discovery challenges the theory of particle acceleration and points to the injection and re-energization of SS 433 jets over long distances, almost 100 light-years from the black hole. says Safi. – Harb.
He adds: “SS 433 teaches us and brings us closer to the rare case of a supernova remnant fed by a black hole, microquasars, ultra-bright X-ray sources (a growing class of X-ray emitters whose nature is is debating) and is a microversion of an active galaxy! “
Matthew Band
This work involved several students from the University of Manitoba and Columbia University, such as Matthew Band, an award-winning for summer research from UM’s Price School of Engineering, who is the co-author of the paper.
“I didn’t expect my summer job to be apart of something like this, I’m excited,” he said. “It’s an honor to learn from such great people and to be a member of this international collaboration.”
The researchers announced the discovery in an article published in the Astrophysical Journal, which will be presented shortly at the International Symposium on High-Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy in Barcelona.
Today’s UM staff