Shocked with "Earth from the dead" emerging from the brink of a black hole

(NLDO) - Data from NASA's observation facilities has confused scientists when revealing an Earth-sized object "making friends" with a black hole.

An international team of researchers has detected unprecedented signals from the monster black hole at the center of the galaxy 1ES 1927+654, located 270 million light-years away in the constellation Draco.

“In 2018, the black hole began to change its properties right before our eyes, with a large optical, ultraviolet and X-ray burst,” NASA quoted Associate Professor Eileen Meyer from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County (UMBC).

Many scientists have been monitoring the "monster heart" of 1ES 1927+654 ever since.

Graphic depicting an Earth-sized white dwarf living next to a monster black hole - Photo: NASA/Aurore Simonnet

By 2023, an international team led by UMBC and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center had recorded a steady increase over several months in low-energy X-rays from this black hole.

This was recorded through data from multiple NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) observational facilities.

A more in-depth look in 2024 revealed a powerful and highly unusual radio burst emanating from the black hole, with streams of ionized gas, or plasma, extending from both sides of the monster, totaling about half a light-year in size.

The overall data over different years also shows that the X-ray signal from this black hole continuously increases and decreases by 10% every few minutes.

"One way to create these oscillations is with an object orbiting the black hole's accretion disk," concluded co-author Megan Masterson, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

This discovery is surprising, because the environment around black holes is very harsh. It is even more surprising when the mysterious object is currently stably existing right on the edge of the black hole's event horizon.

The event horizon is the inner boundary of space-time, a limit beyond which anything falling will never reach the observer again.

Over two years, the mysterious object's oscillation period dropped from 18 minutes to just seven minutes, which is normal when something is so close to a black hole and its orbit is shortened by the monster's terrible gravity.

But the surprise came when the latest signals showed a stable oscillation cycle. So the secret behind the object that can resist the power of a supermassive black hole becomes an even more interesting question.

“We were shocked by this at first,” the team admitted.

But then they realized there was a possibility: As the object moved closer to the black hole, matter from it began to be stripped away by its giant companion.

This loss of mass could compensate for the energy taken away by gravitational waves, preventing inward motion.

So what could this companion be? - NASA asked.

A small black hole would plunge straight into the monster black hole, while a normal star would be quickly torn apart by tidal forces.

The study, scheduled to be published in the February issue of the scientific journal Nature, suggests that an Earth-sized white dwarf is the most likely answer.

White dwarfs are the "zombies" of stars like the Sun after they run out of energy and collapse.

Source: https://nld.com.vn/soc-voi-trai-dat-tu-coi-chet-hien-ra-tu-bo-vuc-lo-den-196250120094449817.htm